James at EarlyUS.com

Wholesale is around 18 cents each, retail around 50 cents each.

If it is genuine, then a good guess in AU would be bid: $345, ask: $445.

I agree that neither of them are genuine coins.

After discussing the "challenge coins" with my friend, I did a few online searches, but did not find any encapsulated by NGC or any other legitimate certification company.

Mark, do you think the time span was even longer ? Kidding - no, I really did think I'd found something extremely special. I have been looking for a rainbow-toned steel cent literally for decades. To that point, I FINALLY started sifting through a bag (around a thousand or so) of steel cents I'd bought a long time ago and realized that about 150 of them were reprocessed examples - like this one. That's why it was able to acquire toning. In all these years, I have never found even a single bona-fide rainbow toned steel cent.

You can probably guess why it turned out NOT to be so, but it sure was close . . . .

No offense to NGC, but these are from just about my least favorite era of NGC grading. Not only did I personally dislike the "W" or "T" thing (which I seem to remember PCI using at the time as well), but grading consistency seemed a bit more iffy at that time.

Great, so now I have to back and search through my bag of steel cents ! Thanks for the fantastic information!

I have a friend (ex-Marine) who collects them from all branches of the military. I didn't even know he was a collector until one day a few months ago, I offered him a bagful (about a hundred) that I'd picked up in an auction. They were ALL brand new to his collection, which surprised me, but then he detailed how just about any military personnel can get these made if they are willing to pay to have dies made and set up. At any rate, they are fairly interesting although not my bag of tea.

The OP coin looks like any of numerous similar cast fakes that show up in coin shops just about every day of the week, on average.

I don't think cleaning it makes sense, but that's a heck of a nice error coin in my opinion!

Thanks! I've been working on it for ten years or maybe a little less. My two guiding principles have been: Do not break up any existing proof set, and Try to use only non-certified examples. Although I couldn't hit those goals at 100% (a few coins inevitably had to come out of slabs, like the proof Buffalo nickels), at least no complete proof sets ever had to be chopped up. The album is a Dansco 7091 "United States Year Sets". For my purposes, it fits all the coins from 1936 - 1969 in a nice, compact format. The only annoyance is that pesky 1942 proof set that has an extra nickel, taking up a row all by itself.

These are just quick pics off my iphone - it shows quite a bit more blue in-hand: I still need 1937 and 1938 quarters, as well as that super difficult-to-find . . . 1968-S dime?!

In years past, I used to notice all-too-frequently arm hairs encapsulated along with the coin - by all the TPGs! The problem seems to have lessened over the years, but that's probably the single most aggravating problem I've noticed due to (lack of) environmental controls. Here's a gold coin in a PCGS slab and even the not-so-high resolution photo shows a hair resting on the coin's surface at 3:00.

An NGC MS-61 (no problems) sold for $288 in 2019, if that's any help. Strangely, a PCGS MS-64 sold for the same amount a year earlier, in 2018.