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This is a strange one. Got this 2009 American Samoa quarter in change at the chinese place the other day (the owner is also a coin collector and the food's good, who am I to argue? 
) and threw it under the scope to spot check for doubling in the center of the field as it was the first of the Samoa quarters I'd gotten. The reverse was clear of doubling, and nothing interesting near Washington's ear, so I zoomed back out to 4.5x and something caught my eye.
Along the very bottom of the bust of Washington starting a little to the right of the designer's initials and going across to the left, down into the field and I think maybe even into the left arm of the T is a line of chips/cracks It looks like it could either be a die crack, with die chips added in for fun, a series of die chips with some incidental hairlines, or maybe some sort of pre-strike lamination of the planchet. Option 3 I've tossed out being that any excess metal in the field I think would have been well flattened out, but I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. All of this is definitely raised above the field/design elements, I've looked at it from a number of different angles under the binocular scope I have.
I've attached one image of the hairlines in the initials and the chip/crack to the left of them, the remainder (as most of my resizes are a bit too big apparently) can be found at http://clubseal.net/coins/ .
Anyone have any thoughts on what might be going on with this? The pictures are less than perfect, if other angles are needed or particular areas detailed, please let me know and I'll get some more pictures.
) and threw it under the scope to spot check for doubling in the center of the field as it was the first of the Samoa quarters I'd gotten. The reverse was clear of doubling, and nothing interesting near Washington's ear, so I zoomed back out to 4.5x and something caught my eye. Along the very bottom of the bust of Washington starting a little to the right of the designer's initials and going across to the left, down into the field and I think maybe even into the left arm of the T is a line of chips/cracks It looks like it could either be a die crack, with die chips added in for fun, a series of die chips with some incidental hairlines, or maybe some sort of pre-strike lamination of the planchet. Option 3 I've tossed out being that any excess metal in the field I think would have been well flattened out, but I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. All of this is definitely raised above the field/design elements, I've looked at it from a number of different angles under the binocular scope I have.
I've attached one image of the hairlines in the initials and the chip/crack to the left of them, the remainder (as most of my resizes are a bit too big apparently) can be found at http://clubseal.net/coins/ .
Anyone have any thoughts on what might be going on with this? The pictures are less than perfect, if other angles are needed or particular areas detailed, please let me know and I'll get some more pictures.
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