Coin Lamination Error

Mints have produced coins with a variety of errors including.

Coin lamination error.

While people used coins as currency for thousands of years the practice might have been closer to trading small bits of copper silver gold and other precious metals. Broadstrikes coins struck outside of the retaining collar causing the coin to spread when created. Lamination is when flakes of metal being to peel or flake of a planchet do to impurities in the alloy and this can be attached or detached. Lamination errors are planchet errors in which the surface of a coin cracks and flakes.

Split planchet errors occur on solid metal coins such as alloyed coins like bronze pennies or copper nickel five cent coins and occur due to impurities in those planchets. As a result the coin is struck more than once by the coin dies and this creates the multiple marks on the coin. Mints purchase long strips of metal which are fed through blanking machines that punch out disks known as blank planchets or simply as planchets or blanks on which coins are struck. I can be as small as a pin head or almost as large as the coin itself and is easy to identify since it looks like metal leaf when attached and grainy if detached.

In the case of clad coins the outer layer may be completely or partially missing on one or both sides. Split planchet errors are also similar to lamination errors which occur when parts of the coin flake off due to impurities or other abnormalities in the planchet. Double or multiple strike errors happen when the coin fails to eject from the collar. Lamination errors may be missing or attached to the coin s surface.

Lamination errors part of the blank coin peeled away before workers created the coin. It is generally believed that lamination errors are caused by contaminants in the alloy that cause the metal to separate along the horizontal plane. This determines the size and shape of eventual coins.