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Ten years later, I got this White Whale! DIdn't at first even know it existed but here it is. Now if I can only find the stablemate 1984 FM Specimen Set!

Hi Zo . Funnily enough as you may know I bought a 1922 dot on trident penny recently , and was having a really good close up look at the dot with the magnifying glass, only to discover a minute crack running from the teeth down along the right side of the centre prong of the trident . The crack is hard to see as it blends in with the scratching damage on the face of the die . This dot is of course circular and not elongated at all. I had a count up of all the dot pennies and found that six are elongated , and show a crack running off or extremely close to the dot/comma. I've just three with almost perfectly circular dots two of which have a tiny crack running off the dot . The only one I have with no sign of a crack at all is the 1897 dot , but Freeman states that an example was found showing a tiny crack nearby . I don't have an 1870 dot or the cannon ball 1875 which look to be circular in shape. My thoughts on the drilling of a hole at the end of a crack in order to stop it spreading would only work on a flat sheet , in this case the die is a deep block of metal , and a crack would run extremely deep down into that block , perhaps as deep as an inch [2.5 cm] or more, and it would seem to me that drilling down to that depth with a drill bit of 1mm or less would be near impossible . Any shallow drilled hole would be ineffective as the crack would continue to spread deep within the die Picture Terry

Scrap copper prices are on the up. Weighed in last Monday and got £4.20 kilo. Previous Friday, ie 3 days before was at £4.09. Bronze coins weigh in as heavy copper. Just a tad below bright wire which is the best grade. I weigh in at EMR. European Metal Recycling. It's the people that the side street scrappies go to, so cuts out the middle man. They set their prices for the week, on a Monday.

Each penny is 9.4g and would give a scrap value of 5.0p by my calculation assuming it is all copper.

"Damn it officer - I thought you said a ROOTING enquiry".