Messed up nickel. What do I have?

Dirt Player

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Location
Panama City, Florida
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Tesoro Vaquero
AT Pro
Primary Interest:
Metal Detecting

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Looks like a 2001 (P)
Interesting how it looks though, almost smeared. I've seen a few coins look like this but they are usually much older.
 

It looks like it was sitting in salt water at the beach I find coins like this all the time with this type of pitting metal detecting
 

sand blasted ?
 

It looks like a combo of the sand and salt water over a long period of time
 

I noticed that the letters at the bottom do not seem to have the same kind/amount of wear as the rest of the nickel. I think that natural/sea wear would be more uniform. Worn die? Also less probable. The wear looks intentional/man-made to me.
worn nickel.webp
 

What you have there is rarely seen and more rarely found. It's a true P.O.S nickel. J/k, I have no idea, really....
 

It's not from sea water, and it's not man made wear either. The entire design is mushy and/or flattened, and that's caused by a poor die state. If this was man made it would be flat and there would be evidence of tool marks. I have several examples of this occurance and have seen many more. When a die strikes a planchet, the heat from the pressure momentarily melts the planchet metal into the recesses of the die, if the die is worn from too many uses, and has lost it's sharpness in detail, it will cause the design features to look mushy and muddled.

Using this nickel as an example, I don't see how your statements explain the result shown in the images. In a die, Monticello would be the deepest recessed part of the die. The lettering would be one of the least recessed portions of the die. I think the lettering would suffer failure equal to (if not more than) the deepest recessed portions. YMMV
 

Using this nickel as an example, I don't see how your statements explain the result shown in the images. In a die, Monticello would be the deepest recessed part of the die. The lettering would be one of the least recessed portions of the die. I think the lettering would suffer failure equal to (if not more than) the deepest recessed portions. YMMV

I digress in my statements. The coin is most likely a dryer coin.
 

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The coin is one of two things, (1) it's either a commercial dryer coin or (2) it's been acid dipped But most definitely did not come from the mint this way.
I'm not an expert but thirty years of collecting error coin's tells me this.There is nothing in the minting process of a coin that can cause this but there is a million ways the coin can be damaged after the collar is released and the coin is ejected. It's "PMD" Post Mint Damage
 

I gotta agree with Jasper62. It's some kind of post mint hocus pocus.
 

Looks like a dug coin that was cleaned to me. Looks like someone tumbled it with sand then tumbled with jewelers shot. No an error that's for sure.
 

Definitely a dryer coin.
 

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