Error Coins Archives
Part 3 of the pictoral entries from the Royal Australian Mint's Unexpected Treasures exhibition is a treasure trove of errors for the delight of collectors. Wouldn't you love to have some of these errors! Sadly the errors on display all belong to the Mint's own collection but the Australian Coin Collecting Blog are proud to bring them to you thanks to Chris Zark and our Melbourne Correspondent 'SJS'.
Below is a stunning example of a very dramatic error. Visitors to the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra would have seen this coin before in the error display upstairs. Heat and pressure have welded a bolt to the coin, part of the press feeding mechanism! Now the press would have needed some dismantling to retrieve this error coin.
1992 20c Proof
When dies are mismatched in the press and that particular pair of dies were not intended to mate then you've created a Mule! These combinations are always human error or a deliberate striking. This 1991 5c proof has an Australian reverse and a New Zealand obverse.
1991 New Zealand Australia 5c Proof Mule
Sometimes a blank of the wrong type or size gets mixed into the hopper of blanks ready to be struck. If a coin is struck on a wrong size blank then the result will be a weak strike or missing design because the planchet size or the pressure of the press is set incorrectly for that size blank. Below we see a 1981 20c on a Cupro-Nickel 10c blank and a 1980 2c struck on a Cupro-Nickel 5c blank.
20c on 10c Blank (left), 2c on 5c Blank (right)
The Australian Coin Collecting Blog is proud to bring you Part 2 of the pictoral entries of error coins displayed in the "One in a Million -Unexpected Treasures from the Royal Australian Mint" exhibition. (See Part 1 here) These errors have been picked up by the Mint during production and have never before left the Mint premises. Thanks to 'SJS', our Melbourne correspondent and Chris Zark we're happy to be able to bring you some images of these stunning error coins, some worth thousands of dollars.
This 2009 Australian Citizenship C mintmark one dollar was labelled as another "bottletop" by the RAM. The reverse image (left) looks at first glance like a dished double-strike. Look more carefully though and there are 3 clear strikes! These 3 strikes were made with the coin out of collar resulting in the slightly dished pancake-like appearance of the coin. The obverse..ahh..other reverse shows a late state brockage (of many many strikes) as the image (however distorted) is reversed and incuse as it was struck repeatedly against a struck coin (in this case the die cap) and not the die itself. So, in our opinion, this coin not technically a die cap.
2009 Triple Struck with Brockage
Titled "Once Bitten" a display of 2 double clipped coins showed one struck and one blank. These types of errors easily escape the mint unnoticed. Clips are incomplete planchets arriving at the Mint in large drums from their South Korean supplier Poongsan. Have a close look at the 10c and you can see it has also been struck only partially in the collar making it a triple error coin -a double clipped broadstrike error!
The Royal Australian Mint recently showcased an exhibition of error coins in Melbourne. The display was titled "One in a Million -Unexpected Treasures from the Royal Australian Mint". Thanks to 'SJS', our Melbourne correspondent and Chris Zark we're proud to be able to bring you some images of these stunning error coins.
The Die Cap error is sometimes called a bottletop. This stunning example is of the 2000 subscription silver proof Proclamation penny.
Die Cap Error
1980 1c Die Cap
A Brockage Indent is a rare error and to have the mated pair is a one in a million!
Indented Brockage Mated Pair
Take a look at part 2 for more spectacular coin errors.
Over the next day in Melbourne a display of "whoops" coins from the Royal Australian Mint
is being shown in Federation Square. It highlights mistakes and mishaps in the minting process and also explains that some can be found in your change if you look carefully enough.
A unique collection form the Mint's own collection includes ramstrikes, misstrikes, double strikes, brockages, brockage indents, die fill, split planchets, wrong planchets, clips, cuds and die adjustment (differing pressure) strikes. The sorts of errors some of us can only dream to have in our collections.
Also displayed is a collection found in circulation by one of the countries most passionate dollar collectors. 'Goldseeker' has 'noodled' over 2.3 million aluminium bronze dollars searching for 2001 Centenary of Federation Upsets, Rabbits and the 2000 $1/10c mule. Goldy's display features a clockface of (a selection of) the degrees of upset that can be found on the 2001 COF dollar (the die rotated the entire 360 degrees), a selection of rabbit eared mob of roos dollars and a high grade mule.
Next Tuesday 6th September for 3 days only the Royal Australian Mint are showcasing an exhibition in Melbourne's Federation Square. The exhibition coincides with the RAM's launch of it's 2012 products and features rare and spectacular errors and mis-strikes from their own National Coin Collection. The exhibition is titled 'One in a million -Unexpected Treasures from the Royal Australian Mint' and is surely a not-to-be-missed event for the studious error collector.
Check out some of the coins in the Mint's collection in our previous articles Error Coins at the RAM part 1 and Error Coins at the RAM part 2 or our read up on how they occur in the entries within the Master Error Index.
RSVP for the launch proceedings on Tuesday evening is essential, see the RAM website for more details.
1943 Penny with Die Break
Lots of damage can be done to a coin die during the process of striking many hundreds of thousands or millions of coins and this damage can be seen on the struck coin! Dies can crack, chip or break and pieces of the die can fall off and may go unnoticed until quality control picks up a problem and the die is replaced. Of course it may also be press techicians mishandling the die and causing damage to it.
The coin shown above is a die break where a large piece of the edge of the die has broken away and left a void which fills with metal during the strike. Notice the extreme weakness on the reverse behind the die break where there was no metal left to fill the design. The die break is an expansion of a rim cud. Die cracks are also commonly seen on pre-decimal coins which is the warning sign that a die is about to fail. The die producing these sorts of errors would quickly be replaced.
1987 2c Struck Through oil
The above coin (of which there are 2 -consecutive pair so to speak!) was taken from a 1987 mint roll and shows lovely bright red cartwheel lustre. It clearly shows an error of some sort on the date, but what is it? You could guess that it was struck over a faulty planchet but it has in fact been struck with excess grease or oil on the die. This has left a fuzzy date (compare this with clarity in the rest of the legends) and an area surrounding the date with an indentation made from this grease material left on the surface of the die. This impression would have been left on the obverse of all the coins struck by this die at this time until the grease wore, fell or was wiped away. It's interesting that 2 coins in a single mint roll were found with exactly the same effect.
We call this type of error a strike through or an oil-filled die. A strike-thru could be made from any sort of material invading the space between the die and the planchet at striking. It could be cotton, wire, oil, extra metal or any foreign object contaminating the strike.
1943 Penny with Hole
An impurity in the metal mix used to make the coin planchets can have a spectacular result when this lamination flaw makes it through quality control and the struck coin lands in your pocket. The coin seen above has a hole right through the middle of the planchet! This has been caused by a gas bubble, dirt contamination, foreign material or poorly mixed element in the alloy mix when the sheet of metal was rolled before the planchet was cut and the coin struck.
These sorts of alloy defects can have very differing appearances on a coin as you can see in our previous entries Planchet Flaw Coin Errors and Peel or Lamination Flaw Coin Errors. This example though I think is pretty cool!
Coin Blanks
There are several terms for an unstruck coin. A blank, planchet or flan all of which are discs of metal that are cut from sheets in preparation to become a coin. Australian blanks for circulation coins struck by the Royal Australian Mint are supplied by the Poongsan company in South Korea. The Mint didn't always buy in the blanks though, they used to roll and cut planchets themselves.
Above you can see two different types of coin blanks. The bottom row are simply the discs cut from the sheet of coin metal and the top row are blank planchets which have been edge milled or rimmed in preparation for their trip through the coin press.
A simple coin blank can be picked up cheaply but there's something special to look out for. If that blank has passed through the coin press -and you can prove it, then it will be much more valuable! If there's even a hint of the coin design which might be a faint impression as seen on a die adjustment strike coin error or the impression left when the coin die just caught the edge of the blank then your "blank" could be worth 10 or 100 times more than it will as a blank. I say "blank" because it's now not a simple blank it's an error coin!
It's important to weigh your blank to help determine what the planchet was intended for. A coin blank I purchased as an Australian $1 unstruck planchet (shown above top second from right) appears to be aluminium bronze but it's weight isn't quite what it should be. It's actually 9.3g and not 9g as a dollar should. I can only guess then that it might actually be a blank for a Danish 20 kroner! Some blanks might weigh what they should but it's the composition that would determine what the coin should have been. An 11.31g round planchet has a number of possibilities, a pre-decimal florin (but is it pre 1946 sterling silver or post 1946 50% silver) or maybe a cupro-nickel decimal 20c?
Also worth discussing is that a coin blank is not technically an error coin. It simply hasn't finished it's process of becoming a coin.
1975 50c Indent with partial brockage
This indent coin error has occurred when the previously struck 50c failed to exit the press cleanly and was jammed against the new blank when it was struck. This has left the impression and incuse (brockage) imprint of the coin that didn't make it off the press. We've seen this before on Australian pre-decimal coins and we've come across what is such a superb example that we'd like to share it with our readers. The penny in our previous entry linked to above is the exact same type of error and the same malfunction in the press has occurred. When comparing the 2 examples you can clearly see the factors which make this coin a genuine mint error and not some kind of manufactured in the "back shed" variety. The fact that the reverse design is so well struck and remains undamaged tells us that the coin was pressed against the die when the indent happened. If it were post mint damage then we would certainly see intrusion or flattening of the design on this coin's reverse -which there is not.
