Looking thru the rolls of 2001 halves I just got from the mint looks like Philadelphia is lacking Q.C. I don't think any of these would make 63's Sorry about the quality of the pictures but until I get a camera with a good macro mode....

A large percentage looked like a bad tinning job had been done.





The whole coin is wavy? And indestinct. With normal eyesight it looks hazy, closer up it does look like someone attempted a tinning job on it. Anybody knows what causes this?

Not an error, but since it was in the same batch.
One more from Philadelphia. A thin die crack from the rim along the base of the bust in to the initials. 3 of these turned up. It is just noticable without magnifaction.



Now the Denver mint looked good. One may be a 68. The rest were pretty solid. Even at 30x.

No takers on what happened? I was almost thinking about ugliest coin competetion uncirculated condition.

well first coin is a severe case of what has been called die flow...as the die wears out it also starts to spread out this shows up a wavy look to certain areas....but I haven't seen one this bad

Well, I have six of the same thing. And one worse. Here's one with it covering the entire reverse.



The others have it also just not as much as this one. It seems to slack off toward the bottom.

hmmmm....that's weird....it looks like die flow to me.... you would expect to find a few of them because they are off the same dies....but they should be very near identical

You can even spot differences on the eagles head.









BTW the "mint Luster" on that one is there, just not on the others.

It could be some sort of something icky on the dies....it could I guess be a thin layer of grease on the dies....That might cause the coins to look like that...and the differences in the eagles heads would also be congruent to a strike through of something like that...

Hi,
This is a result of die wear. Die fatigue is the terminology used. This kind of effect is very common particularly on Five-Cent pieces. Nickel is a very hard metal to strike and dies wear fairly quickly. Clad coins like the halves are also very prone to this.
Have Fun,
Bill

I have two sac dollars with this same effect on their obverses, the only thing is all the lettering is doubled as well. I assumed it was something called machine doubling, but because the surface is so bad I wasn't sure. Have a look and let me know eh?

Looks like die stress and machine doubling to
me also.

I am not big on coin errors, but when I got these two out of a roll of dollars it made my day for sure. I'm keeping the hardest doubled one and trying my luck on ebay with the other. Because I don't really collect errors I only see the need for the one, and that's only because it's the first real error coin I've ever found. Gatta love the high standards at the mint eh? heh.