What Happened to This Nickel?

[tdziemianowicz]

Interesting day at the retail store (not coins) where I work part-time. 

A 1943P Nickel and a Zimbabwe 10 cent piece showed up in the nickel copartment of the change drawer.

On further inspection when I got home, the reverse of the nickel has a sort of double rim from 4:00 to 9:00, and these surface features in the lower right quadrant.  Curious if this was a die/minting issue or post-mint damage. features in the lower right quadrant:

[elheron-grande]

Perhaps that coin received a hard whack from a die?  Quien Sabe?

Regados. 

[*smedley*]

that's a lamination error, relatively common among war nicks... it's caused by an improper alloy mix...

[agathetyche · Accepted solution]

Looks like a lamination. Impurities in the alloy cause fragments of metal to peel off after the coin has been struck. Sometimes you find coins that have split in half from the interior flaws. 

[tdziemianowicz]

---

@agathetyche wrote:

Looks like a lamination. Impurities in the alloy cause fragments of metal to peel off after the coin has been struck. Sometimes you find coins that have split in half from the interior flaws. 

---

Thanks!  I had heard of laminations before (or maybe more accurately delaminations?), maybe out here, but never had an example that I was aware of.  Certainly the mess between CENTS and the ELLO of Monticello, as well as higher up on the building looks like metal peeling or chunking away.

I also thought it was odd that in some places there were cracks running through the letters (in CENTS for example) but in other cases, there are intact letters over what look like cracks (M in America).

I guess coining wasn't the most important thing taking place in 1943.

[agathetyche]

The silver alloy they used during the war years was particularly messy. I think the Mint had a hard time controlling the proportions. Of course, they probably could have used the same steel makeup they used for the cent, but that would have been too easy. 

[tdziemianowicz]

---

@agathetyche wrote:

The silver alloy they used during the war years was particularly messy. I think the Mint had a hard time controlling the proportions. Of course, they probably could have used the same steel makeup they used for the cent, but that would have been too easy. 

---

After reading your earlier comment, I did a bit of research, and indeed found that war nickels were particularly susceptible to lamination (more recently also clad coinage).  One can find a bunch of recent eBay sales of war nickels that have large hunks of metal missing (I can't comment on whether they are really laminations or somethig else, but war nickels are disproportinately represented in the sales of coins claimed tobe laminations). 

I went digging and found other war nickels I'd thrown in a coin tube over the years, and found another one with a small flaking type lamination.

I wonder if there was something about that wartime allow (Cu/Ag/Mn) that made them inherently weaker, or if it was quality control like you mention.