Q. WHAT DO CLASHED DIES LOOK LIKE?

A. All dies used by the United States Mint are heavily abraded to remove all traces of design elements on the die itself. So unfortunately, there are no examples of clashed dies that did make U. S. minted coins. However, thanks to Ken Potter, we are able to see a pair of clashed dies from a 1997 Mardi Gras token. These dies can also qualified as being MAD clashed dies, but are not included as such in the site since they did not produce an actual U.S. coin. These dies, as Ken noted, were replaced after the clash. The white arrows show the location of the clash marks

Q. WHAT EXACTLY IS A CLAHED DIE?

A clashed die or die clashes are when the obverse and reverse dies meet without having a planchet in between the two dies. This results in a transfer of design elements  form one die onto the other. The transferred design elements are referred to as clash marks.

There are two periods or eras of clash dies: the modern age clashed die, which began with the advent of the mechanical coin press in the 1840s and the pre-modern or ancient clashed die, which would account for all clashed dies that occurred before the mechanical coin press.

While it can be said that the ancient clashed dies were a result of human error, that can not be said of the modern clashed dies being the result of mechanical failure. It is possible, especially when looking at the MAD die clashes, that there may have been a human factor involved in the making of those unusual clashes.

BJ Neff