AboutMyCoinMercury Dime Cheat Sheet
Notes
- Every Mercury dime is 90 per cent silver, the commonest date as much as the scarcest.
- No dimes at all were struck in 1922, 1932 or 1933.
Condition
As always, condition matters when it comes to Mercury dimes. Mercury dimes 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1916-D | |||
| 1921-D | |||
| 1921 | |||
| 1931-D | |||
| 1926-S | |||
| 1931-S | |||
| 1930-S | |||
| 1931 | |||
| 1928-D | |||
| 1929-S | |||
| 1927-S | |||
| 1927-D | |||
| 1929-D | |||
| 1925-D | |||
| 1938-D | |||
| 1925-S | |||
| 1923-S | |||
| 1930 | |||
| 1934-D | |||
| 1924-D | |||
| 1926-D | |||
| 1924-S | |||
| 1928-S | |||
| 1938-S | |||
| 1919-S | |||
| 1936-S | |||
| 1917-D | |||
| 1919-D |
Common Mercury Dime Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| 1945-S micro S | A noticeably smaller S mint mark than the one used on the other 1945 San Francisco coins. Two punches were in use that year.The two sizes are told apart side by side. A worn or grease-filled ordinary S looks small on its own, so compare it with another 1945-S before deciding. |
| 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 Mercury Dime Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| 1942 over 1 | The flat top bar of a 1 showing to the left of the 2 in the date, raised and level with the bases of the other digits. On a genuine one the right leg of the R in LIBERTY touches the feather above it.Almost every example offered is an ordinary 1942 with a 1 cut into it by hand, which leaves tooling marks and a halo of displaced metal around the date. The overdate is raised design, with the same surface as the field beside it. |
| 1942 over 1-D | The same overdate on a Denver coin, with a D below the rods on the reverse.Scarcer than the Philadelphia overdate and altered just as often. The tooling test is the same, and neither one is ever settled by eye alone. |
More on the series: Mercury dime.