AboutMyCoinBuffalo Nickel Cheat Sheet
Notes
- Every buffalo nickel is 75 per cent copper and 25 per cent nickel. None of them holds any silver.
- No buffalo nickels were struck in 1922, 1932 or 1933.
- The date sits on the highest point of the design and wears away first. A dateless one is worth very little whatever else is sharp.
Condition
As always, condition matters when it comes to buffalo nickels. Buffalo nickels with all of their features, or with nice original lustre, should be set aside.
Dates
Dates and mint marks to be on the look out for.
| Date | Mintage | Rank | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1926-S | 970,000 | Key date | Lowest mintage of the series. Nearly always weakly struck and heavily worn. |
| 1931-S | 1,200,000 | Key date | Saved in quantity at the time, so sharp ones are less scarce than the figure suggests. |
| 1913-S Type 2 | 1,209,000 | Key date | The bison stands on flat ground rather than on a raised mound. |
| 1924-S | 1,437,000 | Key date | Weakly struck as a rule. A readable date and a full horn are what to look for. |
| 1915-S | 1,505,000 | Key date | |
| 1921-S | 1,557,000 | Key date | Usually mushy. Check that the date and the horn are both still there. |
| 1913-S Type 1 | 2,105,000 | Semi-key | The bison stands on a raised mound. Two different 1913 designs. |
| 1927-S | 3,430,000 | Semi-key | Scarce sharply struck. |
| 1914-S | 3,470,000 | Semi-key | |
| 1914-D | 3,912,000 | Key date | Low Denver mintage, and a traditional key date. |
| 1913-D Type 2 | 4,156,000 | Semi-key | The flat-ground design, and much scarcer than the mound version. |
| 1917-S | 4,193,000 | Semi-key | |
| 1925-D | 4,450,000 | Semi-key | Struck from tired dies. Sharp ones are scarce. |
| 1918-S | 4,882,000 | Semi-key | |
| 1924-D | 5,258,000 | Semi-key | |
| 1913-D Type 1 | 5,337,000 | Better date | The mound design, and far commoner than the 1913-D Type 2. |
| 1930-S | 5,435,000 | Better date | |
| 1937-S | 5,635,000 | Better date | |
| 1926-D | 5,638,000 | Better date | Weakly struck. Set a sharp one aside. |
| 1927-D | 5,730,000 | Better date | |
| 1923-S | 6,142,000 | Better date | Soft mint mark as a rule. |
| 1925-S | 6,256,000 | Better date | |
| 1928-D | 6,436,000 | Better date | |
| 1928-S | 6,936,000 | Better date | |
| 1938-D | 7,020,000 | Better date | The last year, and Denver struck all of them. See the D over S below. |
| 1934-D | 7,480,000 | Better date | |
| 1919-S | 7,521,000 | Better date | |
| 1915-D | 7,569,500 | Better date | |
| 1929-S | 7,754,000 | Better date |
Common Buffalo Nickel Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| 1938-D over S | A 1938 mint mark showing the curve of an S underneath the D, both raised. Denver struck every 1938 nickel, and some of the dies were made from leftover San Francisco punches.Machine doubling and a grease-filled mint mark both leave a blob that is not an S. The under-letter has to be a readable curve in the right place, and this is one to settle under magnification rather than by eye. |
| Off-centre strike | Part of the design is missing and a plain crescent of blank metal is left in its place. The struck part stays fully sharp right up to where it stops.A coin ground, filed or mangled by machinery after it left the mint loses detail gradually and leaves burred metal. A genuine off-centre strike has a clean, sharp boundary and an untouched blank beside it. |
| Clipped planchet | A smooth curved bite out of the rim, with the rim flattened or the design weak directly opposite it.A coin cut or snapped after striking has a rough edge and a burr. That weakness opposite the clip is the part that is hard to fake, so if the rest of the rim is perfectly normal, be sceptical. |
| Die crack or cud | A raised irregular line wandering across the flat field, or a raised blob of blank metal over the rim where a piece of the die broke away.Raised is the die; cut into the surface is damage. If a fingernail catches in it, it is a scratch. Worth very little unless the cud is large. |
| Repunched mint mark | The mint mark shows a second, offset outline of itself, both impressions rounded and equally raised.Machine doubling is far more common and looks flat, shelf-like and shiny along its doubled edge rather than rounded. If the second image reads as a smear rather than a second letter, it is machine doubling and is worth nothing. |
| Lamination flake | A thin layer of metal peeling away or already missing, in a flat irregular patch, caused by impurities in the strip the blank was cut from.Corrosion and environmental damage look similar and are very common on coins that sat in the ground or in a damp jar. A lamination has a clean step down to the layer beneath; corrosion is pitted and rough. |
Rare Buffalo Nickel Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| 1937-D three-legged bison | The bison's front near leg is missing below the body on a 1937 Denver coin, taken off the die by over-polishing. A genuine one also shows a rough, moth-eaten back leg and a raised streak of die damage between the back legs.Almost every example offered has had the leg filed, ground or acid-etched off an ordinary 1937-D. That leaves tooling marks and a flat patch where the leg was, and the back leg and the belly stay perfectly normal. The rough back leg is the part a faker does not reproduce. |
| 1936-D three-and-a-half legs | The same die polishing on a 1936 Denver coin, but less of it: the front near leg is thinned to a stump rather than removed.It is far less dramatic than the 1937-D and correspondingly easier to imagine on a worn coin. A leg worn away by circulation tapers evenly; the variety has a sharp break where the polishing stopped. |
| 1918 over 7-D | The top of a 7 showing inside the last 8 of the date on a 1918 Denver coin, raised and part of the design.The date is on the highest point of a buffalo nickel and is the first thing to wear, so most examples offered are worn 1918-D cents with a damaged or imagined 8. A genuine one shows the 7 as clean raised metal with the same surface as the field. |