The Missing Piece: A Beginner’s Guide to Clipped Planchets

It all begins at the mint. Huge machines ensure that the nation’s coins are impeccable, but every once in a while, an imperfection is overlooked and a special coin ends up in a dark blue bag with other freshly struck coinage. The bags are loaded onto a truck and taken away to a building where they will be distributed to the public. Eventually, a bank visitor is about to plop that special coin into his pocket when he notices its unusual qualities and recognizes it as an error coin! This is the story of countless coins from the mint. You are probably wondering, what are errors? The short answer is that errors are fascinating chunks of metal, but this article gives the long answer, which is much more interesting. 

Just like people, coins can have mistakes, which makes coin collecting so exciting! I’ve always been especially fascinated by clipped planchet errors because chunks of the coins are actually gone. The main types of clipped planchets are curved, straight, and ragged clips.  

Types of Clips

U.S. coin blanks are supposed to be perfectly round. To achieve this, sheets of metal are fed into the blanking press, making seemingly perfect specimens. However, when the sheet is fed into the press improperly, a big clip can occur. Every so often, the punches can align with the front, sides, and back of the sheet. As a result, a ragged clip can occur, which looks like a piece of string cut with blunt scissors. This type only happens when the sides are not trimmed properly. Otherwise, it would be a straight clip. 

Straight clips happen when the sides are cut properly but part of the coin is stuck off the sheet. This type of error looks like it was chopped off smoothly with a sharp knife. Last, but not least, is the curved clip. This is made when a blank is punched where another was already struck, creating a half-circle-shaped specimen.

Other types of clipped planchet errors exist, but most are just subcategories of the ragged, curved, and straight clips. For example, the crescent clip, which looks like the moon in waning gibbous, is just a curved clip with a giant hole that’s 60 percent of the coin’s size or bigger!

Another subcategory of curved clips is the bowtie, which has at least two big clips opposite each other and looks so much like the fashion item that the young entrepreneur of Mo’s Bows loved so. If you attached a safety pin to one, and then pinned the coin to your shirt, it would make a perfect numismatic bow tie, and you would be the talk of the town just by taking a trip to your local coin shop!  

There are a couple more types that are not subcategories, but they are very rare. One is an outside corner clip. This interesting specimen is created when the blank is punched on one of the four corners of the planchet sheet, creating a coin with a right angle. This is a great coin for a teacher to buy to educate their students about angles. The rarest type of clipped planchet is the inside corner clip, also called an assay clip. This unique type of coin is made when a triangular piece of metal is cut off the planchet sheet to test its physical properties. These coins look like Pac-Man.

There is a large variety of clipped planchets, so you can choose the one (or more!) that appeals to you. Savor every experience on your coin-collecting journey and strive to get the very best grade, size, and eye appeal that fits your budget. Enjoy!

Ben Lewandowski is a self-proclaimed “coin nerd” that once sent a letter to Q. David Bowers. He is 10 years old and loves large cents, silver, making Rube Goldberg machines, rock climbing, and reading Heritage Auctions catalogs. You will often find him researching, writing, and with a book in hand wherever he goes. His dream job is being a professional cataloger.