Not sure what to make of this. Help please looking at mint mark. 0

[Tridmn]

1979 d nickel. Any help is appreciated.

Edited October 15, 2019 by Tridmn

[Just Bob]

I see what appears to be a hit to Jefferson's ponytail, but the picture is so close, I am not sure what I am supposed to be looking at. What is the area of concern?

[Tridmn]

The mint mark. Almost looks like its reversed as far as it punched the middle, but not the actual D itself.

[Greenstang]

Would you please post a photo of the whole coin and is that incuse?

[Tridmn]

20 minutes ago, Greenstang said:

Would you please post a photo of the whole coin and is that incuse?

 

[Tridmn]

My phone doesnt take the best pics

[Tridmn]

[Crawtomatic]

Is it stamped into the coin?  Appears so in most of these pics.  Which would mean it was added after it left the mint.  Usually counterstamps are more creative than this.

[Greenstang]

I thought that by looking at the first picture, the D looks incuse but your last picture verifies it. It is impossible to have an incuse MM as that means that it would have to be raised on the die and the MM's were hand stamped. As CRAWTOMATIC states, it was for some reason counterstamped after it was struck at the mint.

[Tridmn]

Yes, it is stamped like this. Only the middle is raised. So, seeing as how I am still pretty new to all of this... what does all that mean? It is a mint error, and would that make it worth keeping or having it looked at?

Edited October 15, 2019 by Tridmn

[Crawtomatic]

Not a mint error.  It's a spender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countermark

[VKurtB]

I think you may have some lighting angle effects going on here. I was messing around with the ringlight on my microscope setup this past weekend and I found these anomalous dark spots in my photos. They were merely from angles that do not reflect the LED light up to the objective lens, or also are mirrorlike and bounce the light away at the same incident angle that the light came from. LED's are not a good light with which to evaluate coins. In fact, you really shouldn't trust anything you see with an LED lit microscope at all! There are "standards" for viewing coins, and LED's in microscopes are not one of them.

[Conder101]

I think everyone is missing what he is asking about.  He want to know why the center of the D is filled instead of being hollow like a normal D.

On the die the letter is incuse or sunk into the surface of the die.  That creates a little "post" in the center of the D that creates the hollow center of the D on the coin.  If that post chips off the result is a D that has the outer shape, but the center of the D is just featureless lump.

Technically it isn't a mint error, it is a die stage and clogged" mintmarks like this are fairly common so there is no premium value.

[VKurtB]

35 minutes ago, Conder101 said:

I think everyone is missing what he is asking about.  He want to know why the center of the D is filled instead of being hollow like a normal D.

On the die the letter is incuse or sunk into the surface of the die.  That creates a little "post" in the center of the D that creates the hollow center of the D on the coin.  If that post chips off the result is a D that has the outer shape, but the center of the D is just featureless lump.

Technically it isn't a mint error, it is a die stage and clogged" mintmarks like this are fairly common so there is no premium value.

Chipped off D mintmarks are kind of common, especially since we got the silver out of coins. 75/25 cupronickel is tough stuff. Chipping off that little itty bitty plateau is trivially easy. Because of the basic shape, the S mintmarks don't usually have that problem. Until you look at a 1935-S California Pacific Exposition Commem Half Dollar. Quite possibly the ugliest S mintmark in U.S. history, until the 1979-S Type I proofs.

[Crawtomatic]

On 10/15/2019 at 3:22 PM, Tridmn said:

Yes, it is stamped like this. Only the middle is raised. So, seeing as how I am still pretty new to all of this... what does all that mean? It is a mint error, and would that make it worth keeping or having it looked at?

@Conder101 I think he's saying somebody stamped the D into the coin.  "only the middle is raised"  If it were a die chip then he'd be saying the whole D is filled.

[Marquez-Collector]

1 hour ago, VKurtB said:

1935-S California Pacific Exposition Commem Half Dollar. Quite possibly the ugliest S mintmark in U.S. history

I had to look it up, hardly resembles an S. 

https://www.ngccoin.com/coin-explorer/silver-commemoratives-pscid-71/1935-s-san-diego-50c-ms-coinid-19371

Link Just in case.  ^^^^