AboutMyCoinWheat Penny Cheat Sheet
Notes
- Cents dated 1943 are zinc-coated steel and jump to a magnet. Every other wheat cent is bronze or brass and does not.
- Cents dated 1944 to 1946 were struck from brass made with salvaged shell cases, with no tin in it.
- Philadelphia struck no letter on its cents, so a wheat cent with nothing under the date came from there.
Condition
As always, condition matters when it comes to wheat pennies. Wheat pennies 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.
Common Wheat Penny Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| BIE die break | A small raised vertical bar between the B and the E of LIBERTY, so the word appears to read BIE. Raised, because it is metal that flowed into a crack in the die.A scratch or a gouge is cut into the coin and sits below the surface. If a fingernail catches in it, it is damage rather than a die break. |
| 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 Wheat Penny Errors
| Error | What settles it |
|---|---|
| 1943 bronze cent | A magnet. Every ordinary 1943 cent is zinc-coated steel and jumps to a magnet; a bronze one does not, and weighs about 3.1 grams against 2.7 for the steel.This is the most faked coin in the series. Almost every non-magnetic 1943 cent is an ordinary steel cent that has been copper-plated, which a magnet still catches, or a 1948 cent with the 8 reshaped into a 3. Fewer than two dozen genuine examples are known and one is never settled by eye. |
| 1944 steel cent | A magnet again, the other way round. The cent went back to bronze in 1944, so a 1944 that sticks to a magnet and weighs about 2.7 grams is the one to look at.A plated 1944, or a genuine 1943 steel cent with a reshaped last digit, accounts for very nearly every example anybody brings in. Weigh it before believing it. |
| 1955 doubled die | Strong, fully separated doubling on the date and on the words LIBERTY and IN GOD WE TRUST, clear without magnification. Both images are equally sharp and rounded.Two more common things are mistaken for it. Machine doubling leaves a flat shelf rather than a second rounded image; and the 1955 “poor man’s” version is die wear showing on the 5s alone, which is a different coin and worth very little. |
| 1922 plain, no D | A 1922 cent with no mint mark at all. Denver was the only mint striking cents that year, so a genuine one comes from a die whose mint mark had been polished away, and the accepted version has a strong, sharp back.Weak and partly filled D mint marks from the same year are common and are not the variety. If the back of the coin is soft as well, it is a worn-die 1922-D, which is an ordinary coin. |
| Wrong planchet strike | A scale. A cent struck on a blank meant for another denomination comes out the wrong weight, and usually the wrong colour or diameter — a cent on a dime blank is silver-coloured and about 2.5 grams.A cent that has been plated, acid-treated or run through a novelty press accounts for almost all of these. The weight settles it, and it has to be right for the denomination the blank came from rather than merely wrong for a cent. |
More on the series: wheat penny.