strike doubling vs. double dies

[phrostie]

all,

beginning to go through my coins to check for errors. I have the cherrypicker's guide with an awesome microscope (easier than sticking that loupe up to my face everytime) and am ready to roll. I started looking through some of my 40% to error check...I'm mostly seing strike doubling I believe.

For those of you who error check more often, how are you able to discern between the two? And do you get better at it the more you look through them (because with one roll it took me awhile)?

Thanks,

~phrostie

 

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[GMan00001]

Strike doubling tends to be flat almost like the feature were dragged across.

A true double die would show the same rounding as the original die.

Also a true double die will produce a number of coins with the exact same doubling and identifiable marks whereas strike doubling does not.

The following website shows some pics of doubling (as well as some other errors)
http://www.numismedia.com/coinguys/top50kenn.shtml

I can't imagine it being veary fast with a microscope no matter how good you get at it.

Personally, I separate them by date/mintmark and then line up all of one variety on the desk/counter or wherever. Once lined up, use a loupe to look them over one after the next. Ideally, the lettering is turned the same way so I can just focus my attention to the area where the doubling is known. Granted this only works on coins where you are looking for known doubling which is all I ever did.

I used to do this with bags of pennies where I would pick out all of the following varieties and then when I was done with the bag look for errors. I looked for 1971 DDO, 1972 DDO, 1980 DDO, 1983 DDR, 1984 DDO (Doubled Ear), 1992 Close AM, 1992-D Close AM, 1995 DDO, 1995-D DDO, 1998 Wide AM, 1999 Wide AM, 2000 Wide AM.

Back when I was searching for those errors, a bag of pennies would take approximately 2 hours. Now that I don't error search, I don't even turn most coins over to read the date, so a bag of pennies only takes slightly less than 30 minutes. Also note that for all my extra effort and time spent, I would typically only find one additional keeper out of every 6.5 $50 bags (1 per 13 boxes). That roughly equates to 10 hours spent per error found.

I still error search halves most of the time, 1969-S and 1970-S pennies, and will occasionally eyeball some pennies as I am searching for the wide or close AM varieties, but I just don't have the time needed to dedicate to error searching. Nor did I find it as much fun. Granted pulling out the 1992-D Close AM was pretty thrilling, but that not withstanding it is a lot of extra effort for little benefit in my book, so until my time becomes more available I will probably not do it much.

Good luck with it though.

 

[GMan00001]

And for those of you into error searching pennies with microscopes, this site may be for you as it photos of 2,477 different die varieties that show how to identify each many of which are hard to see without proper magnification.

http://www.coppercoins.com/