cladking

I don't have any known facts to prove it but I believe the mint had been automating some aspects of mint set assemblage in the '70's. But in 1980 much more became automated. In the past there there were a few sets with all nice coins but after 1979 this stopped. Perhaps not coincidentally virtually all '80-D half dollars in mint sets have shallow scrapes on the reverse. I think this is a case of specially made leading to carelessly handled. It's a real shame too since this coin was made so extremely well and many escaped becoming marked until right before being inserted into the packaging. There are some similar anomalies as well including the nicest dimes of 89-D(?) having a deep short scratch right in front of the bust apparently made coming out of the coining chamber. When something goes wrong in an industrial process it can affect the entire production or significant percentages of it.

Marking has been the problem with mint set coins all along. Most are well struck by good dies. This marking can be virtually universal for some of them. There have been changes and variation between years and even within years and the variation affects virtually everything from planchet preparation to packaging. There are some truly strange and wondrous coins in these sets with perhaps the strangest being a 1966 quarter that is struck by very poorly detailed dies but is often virtually mark free. There are '80-D nickels and '88-D cents that can be mistaken for frosted proofs. Each date has a unique luster that can be identified from a distance in some cases. A '72 has a high luster and a '74 is subdued. '77's have a sort of matte appearance. All '75's are tarnished and in cracked and yellowed packaging but the '76 is often OK. Different techniques were used in die preparation and almost every single parameter. But most all of these coins are well struck by good dies. This tends to be unusual for the coins made for circulation. Mint quality has waxed and waned all along but with the states quarters they began almost immediately to do a better job both with those made for circulation and for mint sets. Lots of Gems started appearing in circulation and became more and more typical in the sets. Before '99 they just didn't have much of an audience for their product. They certainly tried to do better with mint sets starting in '85 even using burnished planchets but marking, if anything, got worse. By '96 they had most of the bugs worked out of all their coins but the highest quality coins were still a little unusual. Some dates were pretty bad and if they had advertised them as "specially made" some customers would have taken issue with that. No date was so well made that it didn't have a few clunkers in most sets.

One can hardly imagine why the mint should be so secretive about mint set production. Perhaps they feared that if collectors knew they would avoid them as not being representative of circulation coinage so they just referred to them as "standard coin". Of course once a coin is removed from a mint set it can't be distinguished from a circulation example of comparable quality but the fact is there often is no circulation example of comparable quality and no means to prove it. Circulation issues on rare occasion come out of the mint almost perfect just like about 2% of mint set coin. Perhaps they were concerned that mint sets would be more popular and they wanted to make about what they were making. Note that in 1979 when mint set production began soaring they discontinued them altogether. Of course there are many possibilities for this but perhaps the simplest is the correct one: In government (and industry) the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. On one hand they made lots of Gems and on the other they had no clue and no means of knowing how or why. Mints have historically had a love hate relationship with collectors but they do always value one thing we do; preserve nice specimens for the future so getting nice specimens into our hands must be at least some priority for at least some of the workers and staff. There have been nice clads made for circulation all along. If you can find one there will be dozens more in the same bag. But most rolls and bags contain none at all and there are very very few rolls and bags because most moderns come from mint sets.

I should point out that even after 1996 the mint has stated these are "regular production coins" as well. Usually the verbiage is "standard uncirculated coinage" but they are still struck under higher force at lower speeds with brand new dies. Sometimes dies can survive for over a million strikes and even more on pennies but mint set dies are swapped out after only 40,000. Despite all the rolls and bags of circulation issues I've searched I can't recall ever seeing a coin from a new die. They are common in mint sets with about three in every 1000 sets.

How ironic! When in 1996 the mint first admitted in print that mint set coins were "specially made" they didn't then admit this had been true since 1965 either. The more things change the more they stay exactly the same.

Ever since I started studying the great pyramids apparently built ~2750 BC I can't help but have the nagging feeling that all coins are moderns. When I started collecting coins in 1957 buffalo nickels were 19 years old and virtually ancient. The states quarters program was more than half over 19 years ago.

They've done many other things to ,make mint sets nice as well. The biggest thing that they do consistently is to use nice fresh dies but also often use better planchets, special presses, and better hubbing on dies. They also often wash the coins. They've been doing these things since 1965 but until 1996 they claimed they were just like the coins coming off the regular presses. In a sense they were since mint set coins are, in theory, identical to regular production coins in that every coin is engineered to be perfect. But in the real world almost no regular production coin comes out perfect and it's far more common for mint set coins. In 1996 they changed their advertising to include some of these facts about mint set coin production. The reason this isn't common knowledge is that nobody collects moderns and the mint has said something that we interpret to mean the coins are identical far more times and in far more places than they have admitted the coins are made in such a way that there are many more Gems. In many dates the incidence of Gems simply approaches zero. I have never seen a true Gem so I can't give a meaningful estimate of their incidence. But in mint sets usually about 2% are Gems and it can be far higher for something like an '88-D cent where more than half are fully Gem. It hardly matters anyway because for most moderns there are almost no BU rolls and all the coins come from mint sets.

This is still worthy of a lot of research. There are, at last, some good hypotheses though. https://coinweek.com/ghost-coins-1983-d-washington-quarter-varieties/ One of my first guesses was that it is related to proof coin production.

There are still some 700,000,000 of these left. They are thinner and much worse for wear but many survive. Curiously it's one of the easiest older dates to find a coin that isn't cull also. These will be only VG or F usually but they aren't cull. There will typically be an example in every other roll. 5 or 10% look fairly good. It is also the only early date with a lot of outliers in grade, Some people hoard them because it's first or they think they contain a little silver so some spend less time in circulation. But the some 1.7 billion 2019 quarters mostly all still survive so they outnumber the '65 in circulation.

People who believe in an overwhelming supply of moderns have never looked for a nice attractive 1969 quarter. This coin is the posterchild of garbage. Of course finding one in circulation is largely a thing of the past. There are very few left and those that survive are ugly poorly struck junk. Good luck finding one of these poor coins. Finding them in most coin shops is also largely a thing of the past. Most dealers try to keep one or two of everything in stock but this is the hardest to keep. They keep expecting someone to walk in and buy mint and proof sets but it hardly ever happens except maybe a few small sales at Christmas time. If you do find a '69 set it will be ugly junk. Not only was the '69 mint set coin poorly made but now the vast majority are tarnished and almost all of them have at least a heavy haze. He won't have a folder of clad quarters sitting right next to his folder of indian cents or Mercury dimes because there's no market. So where do get a nice '69 quarter in solid ch BU (MS-64)? Where do you get one in nice attractive VF? Who do you call if you need a roll for your business or for some promotion. You can't even lay your hands on culls or pristine MS-60's. Where do you get those '69's that were tough even in 1969? Despite selling so many coins I still do have some financial interests in clads. I've sold over 95% of most of what I had including some of the very high grades. But I do still have a few that are too low to grade as well as some top notch coins. But this isn't where I expect to see sharp price increases. I am still expecting the scarcities in MS-63 and MS-64 to come under intense buying pressure. They aren't all that much scarcer than MS-60 coins but they look that much nicer. Collectors are going to avoid low end clad not because it's common but because most of it is ugly. Most of the clad dimes, for instance, before 2017 are elusive in rolls and most of the pre'98 dimes are elusive in nice chBU. If not for mint sets almost all the clads would be extremely tough. But mint sets won't save '69 coins from being tough because the mint sets are mostly gone and the few survivors are tarnished.

I understand your statements here and even largely agree with them. But I doubt you can imagine just how absurd this would sound to a young coin collector or on how many levels it is absurd. For instance not many 12 year old collectors are going to be paying $30 for a clad quarter much less $300. With $30 spent on a nice '83-P quarter he has only $29.75 at risk. $5000 on a Saint puts $2,600 at risk. Really it's a great deal more than that because gold could drop as well. At least the value of the copper and nickel in the quarter can't drop more than several cents. If he's buying coins with Christmas, report card, and birthday money he's never going to be able to assemble a set of Saints even in cull condition but after he buys the quarter he's half way home to a pretty nice collection. Just for the cost of grading and authenticating one Saint he can assemble an entire set of coins from circulation. What would it matter the cost of a Saint if he wanted a clad dime collection? Why would a kid with a Whitman folder even care whether his clad coins will go up or down? You can't go to the bank and get Saints to pick through to make a collection but you can certainly get rolls of dimes for face value and find new specimens to complete and upgrade your circulation set. If you collect only BU then you can still add the later dates from pocket change. . Most newbies are not going to understand your point. I do and the reason I don't agree with it is that investment isn't about making a lot of money. A $5000 Saint going to $10,000 isn't nearly as good as "50" $100 modern going to $1000. In both cases you start with $5000 but in the latter case you end up with a $45,000 profit instead of a mere $5000 profit. The only way the Saint can increase so much is if the dollar becomes virtually worthless and you'd have done twice as well if you had bought two cull saints instead of one slabbed.

People quit saving new coins in 1964 and it is exactly this behavior that defines moderns: Moderns are coins made since 1964 that were not saved by collectors or the general public. Collectors in 1965 hated moderns (1965 coins) and they never ever stopped. They then hated 1966 coins. They told anyone who was interested in coins that coins made after 1964 were garbage, made in huge numbers, and would never be collectible even as garbage or things made in huge numbers. The hobby gained very few collectors after 1964 because anyone interested in new coins was being discouraged. It was so bad that the hobby virtually collapsed in the mid-'90's because the bread and butter coins like a '24-D cent in VF had no demand. You couldn't give most coins away. Only those top pop coins being pursued by wealthy baby boomers had a market. But by this time the modern market was beginning to develop. There were few participants but collectively they were a minor force in the hobby. This market is probably five or eight times the size it was in 1995 but it is still tiny. It is so small it can't even push up the prices of coins with populations in the 10's of thousands. There are a few thousand collectors so anything with a population much higher than this sells for nothing. . There is a new generation of collectors though many are beginners and they won't all collect moderns. Even if they weren't being discouraged and told their treasures are trash they still wouldn't all collect moderns. But these new collectors don't hate moderns and they don't hate clad. To them moderns are just coins just like an '09-S VDB or a bust half. Many are collecting moderns and many more will no matter how much they are told their eagles are just bullion or their mint sets are just pocket change. Not many people any longer born before WWII are actively collecting. God bless them. But their collections are mostly already dispersed and mostly contained very few moderns. Most collections of those baby boomers you see at coin shows contain no or few moderns. There are no old time clad collections containing bags, rolls, Gems, and varieties in great abundance. There is barely even a wholesale market containing coins impounded in inventory or in transit to the next middleman. The coins are gone. WYSIWYG. This was true many years ago as well. Most rare moderns were even rare at the time of issue. No matter how hard you looked for nice choice 1969 quarters you wouldn't find them in 1969 or in subsequent years. They were tough because so few were made and those few were mixed in with the garbage that went into commerce. People weren't even looking for them so they are pretty much all are lost or heavily worn today. . A few people collected these and most saved what they could but I was spending 1983-P nice BU quarters as late as 1985 because I couldn't afford to save many at 25c each. Some guy on the east coast saved a bag of every date and mint quarters but I'm sure his estate did very poorly on this $35,000+ investment. There is still no market and the bags that would sell at a good premium today would probably contain no Gems and no varieties. The lost opportunity costs are staggering. I would wager than many of the commoner dates were just dumped in circulation. There is simply no generation that has or had these coins and now that a new generation wants them they are nowhere to be found. I've been selling into the strength but mine are almost all gone now. Where is the future supply?

If you were right and there is no attrition then Why are2019 quarters with a similar mintage to the 1965 far far more common than the '65? If there are warehouses full of worn or new '65 quarters where are they? Why do people not bring '65 quarters into coin shops? If these were all sitting in change jars then how can 1965 quarters all wear about the same amount? The same applies to mint sets. Despite far lower mintages there are far larger numbers of 2005 mint sets in coin shops than there are 1980 and far more '80's than '69's. It's just the way things have always been. Mountains wear away to sand and sand wears away to virtually nothing. Everything comes and goes and is no more. Clads are just about gone. The ones that survive get thinner and lighter every day.

So what's your theory on why the incidence of 1965 quarters is 45% of the incidence of comparable mintages today?

Well, a lot of these coins that have suffered attrition or been lost forever really will be found for many centuries. Any in the ground will be highly corroded because base metals don't survive in any type of soil. Not even houses survive for centuries and those castles in Europe require constant maintenance after they are rebuilt. Most of these coins though really were destroyed entirely or at least entirely enough. A quarter that sat on the floor in a laundromat for may years behind a washer and exposed to the chemicals will be virtually unrecognizable and will be thrown in the trash and added to landfill where it will continue to degrade. This quarter was probably a heavily worn and poorly made coin anyway but if its remnants are ever found it won't matter even if it started out as a rare variety. Many of the missing coins show up in municipal incinerators and are destroyed before being returned to the mint and melted to make new coins. Many more fall out of the large cubes into which cars are crushed before being melted in electric furnaces. Most coins remain in the car yet some usually mangled and bent coins do fall out and some will be repaired and put back in circulation. These have a high attrition rate because only a small percentage of them will sell on eBay for $1000 and most will eventually find a machine they won't operate and be tossed in the trash and shipped to the nearest incinerator. When houses are flooded they are often bulldozed into large piles and the piles destroyed. Coins will be scattered and buried. The biggest killer though might be house and building fires. The coins are often simply melted into small or large clumps. People drop coins into wells and chasms to estimate their depth. Niagara Falls was shut off some years back for maintenance and they recovered seven truckloads of coins from the bottom most of which were thrown in for "good luck". These coins were often in deplorable condition, unsurprisingly, and of course most zinc coins didn't survive at all. Coins suffer misadventure of all sorts as well as loss. I once spun around in mid-step and was surprised that i did so on a copper penny. The coin was scratched very much like we call "rolling machine damage". What are the odds. The coins simply are everywhere so they get lost. Obviously for the last 30 years they are less ubiquitous because of credit cards and electronic payments but they still accumulate in places they can be lost or destroyed and everytime they change hands they are susceptible to becoming a statistic. We're approaching a 60% loss on 1966 quarters and perhaps a 70% loss on 1967 dimes. But it's not just this loss that is important here but the extreme degradation to which the survivors have been exposed. There are very few collectible 1966 quarters surviving. This is caused by two factors; the coins were horribly made and now they are degraded by extreme wear and damage. It is the damage that might be the most important factor. They are just covered in scratches and are ugly. They have staining and tarnish as well as deep gouges and even bends. As a very common date you can still find an attractive VF without extreme effort but if everyone continues to neglect these coins this nice VF might be the very next quarter to fall through the floor boards. There is no means to stop the few surviving nice clads from degradation and loss other than coin collectors. Whether they start being collected or not they are all going to be gone in another 10 or 20 years. Whether we're still using coins or not these will be gone. If the government stops making coins these will all be gathered up and used to make appliance Just as was done in Europe, South America, and much of Asia. Quarters simply transition from buying toasters to being toasters. Every thing made by man suffers a 1% attrition rate but coins are always much higher.

People are going to be amazed just how shallow the supply of modern is when a market develops. The mint sets that don't sell to estate sales mostly go to wholesalers who destroy them. How do you think those 1978 mint sets from my auction are doing today? Do you think these still survive and were stored properly? The odds are very much against it. Even if they were shoved in a safety deposit box which is highly improbable the coins should have been removed from the plastic and soaked in acetone 10 years ago or the tarnish may already be permanent. There is simply no supply. The estate auction will take the sets back to the shop they bought them from and take a significant loss since they pay 10 or 20% over bid and the dealer will buy them back 30% under bid. The dealer will eventually either bust these sets up himself or he will ship them off to a wholesaler who will bust them up. Where will the supply come from in twenty years? The coins are gone and there will be no "old collections" walking into coin shops because people don't collect these coins. Over time slabbed moderns will simply become a larger and larger percentage of all moderns because most of these coins have a 4% attrition rate and slabbed coins have a 1% attrition rate.

Few people are aware of this but many of the companies that auction off estates buy mint and proof sets. They are far and away the biggest buyers of mint sets from local dealers for the last quarter century and have bought more mint sets by far than all the retail sales of modern mint sets since 1965. They also buy a lot of the proof sets. These are sold at estate auctions because the general public is often enthralled by seeing our current coins in perfect condition. The sets are usually bid up to staggering sums often more than triple bid. Collectors and dealers tend to be wise to this and simply don't go. I was at one auction back around '95 when I first saw this. It's possible they really were part of the estate but this fellow had a few 1982 and '83 souvenir sets and the '82-P had a really nice gemmy quarter that was about the 10th best I've ever seen before or since. I stuck around planning to outbid anyone (up to $50). At the time it was virtually unknown and normally available for a few dollars. All of these sets sold for more than $50. Five nice '78 mint sets that bid at $6 each went for $15 each. They were hardly that nice. I was the biggest buyer for this kind of material in those days and I walked away empty handed. My guess is that were no coin dealers or collectors there because they couldn't outbid the public. Through sheer coincidence there were no members of the public interested in bidding.

@Just Bob is very knowledgeable and I had to go back and edit. But the point is that the vast majority of baby boomers have little or no use for clads and a few generations of collectors have followed in their foot steps until this latest one who are much more striking out on their own. This is in part caused by the total lack of encouragement they get for the "treasures" they find in circulation. And, no, I'm not talking road kill that sells for hundreds on eBay but interesting or desirable coins they get in the bank, find in change, or spot in a mint set. Most people who have historically paid much money for price guides have little use for moderns. Of course now Redbook probably sells a lot more issues to modern collectors than to old time collectors. Still (I haven't seen the '25 yet) prices for moderns are unrealistically low. I'm sure there are many reasons for this including lack of interest by the publishers and readers and markets that are very difficult to measure. But the fact is collecting moderns is still like the wild west. There are no maps and danger and opportunity abound. There is very little competition for even the most desirable coins. Over the years I've spoken or corresponded with many of the publishers and I've probably had some effect even though I'm not certain that effect has always been beneficial. Just reporting a bunch of higher prices is problematical in many ways. There are numerous benchmarks that can be used to see where the problems lie since most nice moderns come from mint sets so prices should usually correlate to the availability in those sets. The bottom line is these markets can be efficient until the pricing is accurate and the pricing can't be accurate until there are more collectors allowing price discovery. I can't help but feel this will move more quickly going forward.

It looks like a lightly tarnished mint set coin whose appearance would be improved with a soak in acetone. As such it is only slightly better than average in most regards. If it cleans up OK there are still several hundred thousand better looking 1972 cents.

It wasn't so much "withheld" as it is a simple matter that "moderns" are not really even considered a part of the numismatic hobby to most dealers, collectors, and numismatists. Until the mid-'90's stores and Madison Avenue depicted coins as 1964 and earlier. Moderns didn't even appear in price guides until the mid-'70's. Redbook lists prices only up through MS-65 with no mention of the fact that higher grades can be worth considerably more. Most of the very worst pricing issues have been resolved over the years. Back in the mid-'90's they listed something like a '24-D cent in VF ~$30 IMS. At that time you couldn't give these away. A retail customer might pay so much but there were no retail customers. If you actually wanted to sell one you better discount it to only a few dollars. At that time I could actually sell many moderns for for three or times the Redbook price. Another problem hinges on definitions. Moderns are graded to the same standards as classics by the standards of the services and this creates some ugly coins in high grade holders as well as some nice Gems in lower grade holders. Then you have interpretation of the meaning of the prices. Some guides actually state that in order to bring the lofty price of $1 in MS-63 a 1977 quarter must be in a TPG holder! This is ludicrous on many levels not least of which is that one of the best attributes of moderns is they don't need to be graded because if they look Unc they are in virtually every single case. The trick isn't to find an example that's actually Unc with no cabinet friction, the trick is to find one that's attractive. There are no AU's or XF's or even VF's. There are no sliders except for the '82 and '83 issues. Back in the mid-'90's for several years I advertised to pay $40 each for Gem '82 quarters. At that time these listed for $40 per roll. I was hoping the few people who set rolls aside would go through their rolls and send me the best few. Despite dozens of ads in various coin papers I got very few responses and even fewer actual coins. Half of what I did get was just junk people pulled out of pocket change. This was 1994 and anyone who thinks you can walk into any coin shop and buy a Gem '82-P quarter for the Redbook price today of $35 (less that what I offered one and a half generations ago) is simply wrong. You will not find a coin shop with one in stock, and any that has a high grade slab will contain a poorly struck coin made by worn out dies. All those ads and I didn't actually by a single Gem. I did pay $40 for a small handful of nice gemmy (MS-64) specimens. I just kept trying because I hoped someone would have a cache of them. I once sent in a remarkably clean 1987-D cent struck by brand new dies with a perfect strike and minimal PL appearance. I was hoping to get a new pop top. It came back MS-65. At this grade I spent $20 to have what might be the best '87-D cent in a holder that is valued at 30c by Redbook today!!! But it has to be graded to be worth 30c. The older classic markets are sufficiently mature that most coins can trade at prices reflective of their value among a large population of collectors. Everyone wants to see high and ever increasing prices. Modern markets are very immature and there are very few collectors. One of the reasons these markets are so immature is that price guides are artificially kept low and one of the chief reasons is that when their customers see modern prices they don't want to see high prices. I would wager most mentors wouldn't know a modern coin if it bit them on the nose. Odds are pretty good that they don't consider them real coins.

I'm jealous of your aluminum. It's probably been more rejected than any other base metal coins and base metal coins are probably the most rejected in history. Debased silver is always rejected as well but it is still silver and does get some interest. I just didn't pay any attention to aluminum unless it was obviously unusual or was Gem. It seems to come either awful or Gem with relatively little in between.

I said ten years ago that if I were a young man I would start collections of aluminum coins. These have done very well over the last ten years but there is still a great deal f potential in them. There are countless greatly undervalued modern coins. I barely have any aluminum at all because such a high percentage of them are exceedingly common because they tend to be very low denomination. But still there are scarcities and many were made to very very low standards so attractive examples can be very elusive even where many exist. Try finding nice Indian 10p coins from the '70's and '80's for instance in anything even approaching Gem.

Q.A.: "Trauma"... "open wounds in the hobby"... "boomers (Me!) are never going to accept clad coins"... Say, I wonder how this guy was able to get ahold of my life story??? Catalogers still list unrealistically low prices for moderns to avoid offending their customers; boomers.

There are literally billions of world coins including billions in BU rolls and in mint sets. But this simple fact has no effect on the price of tea in China nor in the availability of something like a 1950-E E German 10p coin nor a nice 1967 Japanese 100Y. You can't make a silk purse of a cow's ear nor a 1954-B Indian 2 a out of a bicentennial quarter. There is no kind of eraser that will remove a scrape from a '80-D half dollar or the wear from a '72-D type h quarter. It's all done. The fat lady has sung, and the ship sailed. It doesn't matter that you can lay hands on many thousands of Yugoslavian 50 D because many other coins are gone now. Yes, there are millions of proof sets but there are few world mint sets and more importantly very few world modern ever existed in mint sets. It's not "world moderns" that are rare. It's most world moderns. Make a list of all world moderns and 20% of the coins on the list make up 99% of all moderns available. Stick it with a fork because most of the coins have already been withdrawn and melted by the issuer.

Hatred of base metal is a one off. In every country silver was removed from the coinage beginning in 1945. I've always suspected it was a part of the Breton Woods Agreement. In each country people stopped collecting new coins when they were debased. Keep in mind though that in those days more Americans collected foreign coins than the number who collected in those countries. This is still true for more than half of other countries. Americans continued to collect some of these but tended to ignore them. However they did continue to collect foreign base metal coins that existed before the debasement. The switchover to clad was traumatic to most coin collectors beginning in 1964 when it was announced the current date coins would be made for all time killing the BU roll market was was huge at that time. Then it got much worse from there and there are still open wounds in the hobby to this day. The biggest such wound is the simple fact that most boomers are never going to even accept clad coins as actually being coins at all. Even nickels that remained exactly the same in 1965 except far lower mintages could never be seen as actual "coins". Many coins made since 1945 simply no longer exist. Attrition in some cases exceeds 99.9% Coins that defy the odds are usually heavily won and cull. There's a new generation collecting these now right in the countries of origin and prices are simply exploding.