1993D-1DER-022T Trail Die Reverse

Description

Michael Pope of Illinois found the 022T and documented an obverse die gouge with remarkable positional precision: it sits on the lower left serif of the D mint mark. The Denver mint mark on Lincoln cents of this era is a small, punched letter barely a millimeter tall, and identifying a gouge on a specific serif of that letter demonstrates the level of scrutiny that trail die specialists bring to their examinations. A serif is the small decorative stroke at the terminal end of a letter's main stroke — the D has four serifs, and specifying "lower left" narrows the location to a single point on a feature that most collectors cannot even resolve without magnification. A second obverse marker, a small die gouge on the lower right of Lincoln's coat, provides backup confirmation. On the reverse, a small die gouge appears to the left of the U in UNITED. The T suffix designates this as a tilted-trail variety, where the die's lateral instability produced directional trail lines rather than step distortion. At Stage B mid-die-state, the die was still in relatively early service when this variety was produced. Struck at Denver on copper-plated zinc planchets, 2.5 grams, 19mm, plain edge.

Die Markers

• Stage “B”, obverse is MDS – a die gouge is seen on the lower left serif of the mint mark. Another small die gouge is seen on the lower right coat of Lincoln.
• Reverse is MDS – a small die gouge is seen to the left of the U in UNITED.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Michael Pope
• Expert attribution by Trail Dies

External References