Woodies: Why Some Old Pennies Look Like They're Made of Wood

Every so often an old Lincoln or Indian Head cent turns up with light and dark stripes running across it, like the grain in a piece of wood. Collectors call these woodies, and the stripes aren't toning or damage. They're a mistake in the metal itself.

A 1915 Lincoln cent woodie: light and dark bands run diagonally across both sides.

What Causes It

Before 1982, cents were mostly copper (the steel cents of 1943 aside). In the bronze years (1864–1942 and 1947–1962) the rest was a little tin and zinc. If those metals weren't mixed all the way before the metal was cast and rolled into strip, you get streaks in the strip, and every blank punched from it carries them. Error specialists call it an improper alloy mix (or a poorly mixed alloy). Error-Ref notes it's "not that uncommon in the early Lincoln cent series."

How to Tell It From Toning

This is the part people get wrong:

	Woodie (improper alloy mix)	Toning / environmental damage
Where it is	In the metal: wear shows the same streak underneath	On the surface
Pattern	Parallel bands that follow the direction the strip was rolled	Random spots, splotches, halos, fingerprints
Sides	Usually both sides (Diamond notes some show it on only one)	Often one side, or only where something touched it

Woodies and Laminations

A lamination is metal flaking or peeling in thin layers. It's a different error, but the two travel together: Mike Diamond writes in Coin World that laminations are "both common and expected" on ordinary improper alloy mix coins.

Not Every Stripe Is a Woodie

The very thin pinstripes common on 1978–1982 cents may be something else, possibly staining from the rolling process. Diamond doubts they're true alloy-mix errors, and he titled the piece Different causes of stripes on coins are not fully understood. The classic woodie is the broad, irregular banding you see on early Lincolns and Indian Heads.

Even a key date can be a woodie: this 1914-D Lincoln cent shows a bold diagonal band across the reverse.

From the Catalog

Woodies in the NumisDex catalog range from an 1867/67 Indian Head and a 1903 Indian Head to a 1914-D, a 1915 and a 1926 Lincoln. The full breakdown is on the Improper Alloy Mix page.

Sources: Error-Ref, "Poorly Mixed Alloy"; Mike Diamond, Coin World, "Different causes of stripes on coins are not fully understood" (2014); CONECA, Glossary of Error-Variety Terms; Wikipedia, "Penny (United States coin)."