GoldFinger1969

2 hours ago, Zebo said:

Roger - you and gold finger have me thinking. Many double Eagles went overseas - some stored in bank vaults, some melted. England melted them to coin sovereigns, other countries stored them as struck. 

I haven't finished the book yet (about Page 400 ) but I don't think our Mint records (and therefore probably theirs) would show what the source of gold that was being coined or turned into bars came from:  gold mines, gold bars, or gold coins from another country.

But I suspect Roger knows more......

What kind of coins -- Morgan Dollars ?

2 minutes ago, Cat Bath said:

No, It's one of the things I've been meaning to get.  I want credit for this new F-15 non-variety if it isn't in the 1st edition.   Dang...How do I get out of double space?

You won't regret it -- the book is outstanding.

I default to double space whenever I hit ENTER but if you want stuff single-spaced just delete the spaces between sentence, as I did above with your 3-line quote which is now 1 1/2 lines. 

Great info and comments, Conder, thanks ! 

Cat, do you have Roger's Saints book ?  Several pages on the 1908-D No Motto, more than other books which just give paragraphs.

Not familiar with it, can you provide a short summary ?

1 minute ago, Just Bob said:

Translation:  Dear Mr Steele, Here are a few nuts and bolts and some tools. Fix it yourself. Oh, and when you get finished, send our tools back. And pay for the return freight. Have a nice day.

I would suspect that very few companies were authorized to sell printing press equipment to the mints.  So I'd expect a company like this to make sure the customer was happy. 

Any idea how much a press back in the late-1800's or early-1920's cost, Roger ?

I would expect those companies only made minting presses for governments.

Roger, has the U.S. Mint -- or any other mint -- ever considered metals other than steel for striking ?  Aluminum (dissipates heat better than steel) ?  Tungsten ?  Iron ?  Ceramics ?  Composites ?

Seems kind of staid to still be using plain old steel, although I am sure the hardness of today's steel is light-years better than what was made 100 years ago.

I came across this, may dig further but I'm not an expert and I can see there are tradeoffs in terms of strength, weight, brittleness, cost, ability to mold, etc:

https://bortec.de/en/blog/the-hardest-metals-in-the-world/

1 hour ago, RWB said:

Yes. I was there when they were first produced. There are several "progress strike" sets of medals available on the hobby market. They make eye-catching exhibits and also show the diminishing returns from multiple strikes - even with annealing between blows.

I don't understand annealing (yet) but why would higher pressure and/or more strikes prevent the "melted gold" look I see on Page 39 of the 2009 UHR booklet ?  They show the progress from 15 metric tons to 55 metric tons.  It is fascinating.

Do I take it there is close to zero room for error if a coin gets struck more than once...that the metals must align perfectly....because if they are off by more than a micron, you will have doubling or double-images or other defects and maybe coins that don't pass muster ? 

Were you able to see the 2009 UHRs made because you were on the Citizen's Advisory board ?  Wow, that must have been something.  

3 minutes ago, RWB said:

None of the old toggle presses exist in original configuration. All of them used by museums and counterfeiters have been extensively modified over the years. At a normal running speed of 80 silver dollars per minute, a slow motion video would be best.

That's about the speed at which Saints were made, too.

Did you ever see the 2009 UHR Saints book that came with the coin ?  They showed the different looks the "coin" appeared as when struck with different tons of pressure.  When it got too little, it looked like a melted golden chocolate coin.  As the strike pressure increased, the coin looks like the finished product we see for sale.  Very interesting.

Interesting.....I have to scour YouTube and see if I can see how an actual coin is struck.  Reading FMTM and the Saints book, I'm trying to visualize how a coin (planchet) goes from the big triangular feeder to a finished coin at times when reading about what makes a perfect coin, what leads to die failure, die cracks, other imperfections, etc.  It can be tough at times since nobody ever wrote Coin Making For Dummies. 

I'm picking up bits-and-tidbits from the Saints book....for instance, didn't realize (I should have) that the obverse and reverse are struck at the same time which at times can lead to the image or strike force on 1 side "bleeding through" to the other.  I may need to re-read FMTM again.  Of course, a video would probably be best to visualize all the things I/we read about but never saw 1st-hand.

Thanks for the analysis, Zebo.  Interesting.....

Speaking of foreign stuff overseas.....I wouldn't mind learning alot more about how these guys like Paul Wittlin went overseas to Europe or to South/Central America and found these Saint hoards.  It's possible the book talks about it more in-depth later on (I'm @ Page 370 right now ).

I wonder when collectors or their dealer friends first realized that lots of coins survived overseas....how long did they have to spend in Europe or South of The Border to find them.....how much did they pay to free the coins (a 5% premium ? 25% ?  More ?)....were any bank or government officials palms greased ? 

Fascinating when you think about it.  Too bad a few hundred or even dozen of the super-rare ones didn't make it out of Mint vaults and avoid melting by going overseas or south and presereving their mint state condition. 

For those of you considering buying the book:  not only do you have sections where Roger takes a break away from going in-depth on each particular mintmark and year of Saint coins (i.e., The Gold Standard, The Roaring Twenties, etc.), but each coin review has the same sections repeat on survivorship, mintage, assay coins, etc.  After a while, it kind of "drills into your head" and you pick up on stuff that you thought you might not have interest in or understand.  This repetition alone makes the book easier to read than FMTM (still an outstanding book in its own right).

The text has some sections that might not be of major interest (i.e., number of dies used) but also has focuses on Mint Delivery Schedules, Date and Monogram Alignment, Appearance, Die Varieties, a 1976-2015 Price Grid, and my favorite, Commentary.

Commentary I find the most interesting because you get snippets of quotes from various sources....could be a letter from a collector to a Mint official....could be from Bowers or Aker's own books on Saints....the use of that particular year in settling trade flows....hoards discovered for that particular year.  Or Roger's own thoughts.  Or an analysis on condition rarity or the surivorship above/below a certain grade (i.e., the 1921's and the MS65 level).

The book really has you wanting to keep on reading.  

OK, enough for now, I want to make sure I get up to the 1923-D and 1924 sections today ! 

Big day today....I should probably hit the 1923-D and 1924 sections, both coins I own. 

Chapter 4 was very interesting before I hit the 1920's Saints' analyses:

(1)  I didn't know that there was pressure from gold miners to raise the gold price to $40/oz. to improve profitability.  That kind of information gets skipped over when you have a macro view of the Gold Standard.  I guess the miners and management all loved FDR in 1933 when he moved the price to $35/oz.

(2)  Didn't realize how few Saints (Liberty's too ?) actually circulated.  Probably less than 0.1% in the aggregate.  I always assumed it was more, something like maybe 1-10%.  A few dozen numismatists seem to be the ones most concerned with getting the coins and the proofs.  Now I get the appeal of having the Gold Certificates if you wanted gold but didn't want to have 3 or 4 coins in your pocket.  Wish I had asked my grandfather about all this when he was alive (he was born in 1903).

(3)  Die cracks and die breaks analysis was very informative.  Now I understand what they are, the differences, etc.   The crystaline structure of steel and the relative lack of metallurgy knowledge 100+ years ago added to the problem.  I suspect we don't have these problems today.

It would also appear that those years when the description is that it's a "weak strike" means that all or most of the survivors came from a die or dies that was defective.  Assuming the strike wasn't a low pressure thing, unless ALL THE DIES were defective some of the strikes should have been good and some would be "weak" for that particular year.    Now, what actually survived the 1934-37 melt could be the weak strikes, the good strikes, or both.  But the notion that 100% of that year's coins were all "weakly struck" has been disproven from what I read here.  It's just a question of how many defective dies there were and then which coins from which dies survived. 

(4)  The re-striking of a nations's coins was something I didn't know about.  Am I correct that we would melt down British Sovereigns and turn them into coins/bars and they would do the same with Saints ?  I guess I just assumed that there would be a mutual prohibition against melting down and re-coining another country's currency/coins, as opposed to bars of gold.  Guess not !

I'm surprised any country would use a generally unpopular (i.e., not used widely in commerce) coin like the Sac dollar.  Still, nice to see it used SOMEWHERE. 

So I'm reading Chapter 4 and how Mint Curator T. Louis Comparette is securing some "tough to obtain" (i.e., they weren't supposed to be released) 1920 Saints for a museum and collectors. 

Quick, someone notify the Mint and Secret Service, maybe they want to question his corpse !!  

I'm referring, of course, to their obsession about the "unauthorized" release of 1933 DE's.

OK, back to the book....need to make a big dent today if I want to finish by next weekend.....weekends are strictly for reading the Saint book and BARRON's. 

13 minutes ago, Lev99 said:

This thread is awesome!!!  Thanks to OP for starting it and thanks to @RWB for posting about his book. I don't collect DE but it sounds like there's a lot of other information in the book I'll have to check it out. 

@RWB I was soooper curious how you find your source information? Is it you are you sitting in the ANA library everyday, or are you firing off FIOA requests to some lonely custodian of records in the basement at the treasury dept? I never would have thought to check out books on banana wars, or that there was a Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce that existed, let alone put together tables to pull information on coins from. 

Not trying to hijack the thread, but I've studied a little on European and US trade during and right after WW2 and I can't find the answers I'm looking for. It's a real struggle. I sorta gave up but apparently you figured out a good way to find this information.

 

Lev, glad you are enjoying it.  I think my questions and comments are adding something, and Roger is gracious enough to chime in when he can.  He's fantastic...so's the book !! 

Lev, if you want I can probably write down some of the sources that Roger uses in the book...many are listed in the footnotes, which are very good....he may also have a bibliography at the end (I don't know, haven't skipped ahead that far ).  I do believe that Roger uses the Neuman Coin Portal but how to access stuff there is beyond me.

Speaking as an economics and finance guy, some of the sources that he uses for gold flows and trade data look very authoritative.  They are largely from before modern economic statistics were kept by the BEA and Commerc Department, but still very good data.  Central bank records at that time HAD to be accurate, since so much $$$ were at stake.

I'll let Roger respond first, but if you want me to put down some of the sources that he uses that repeat most often, let me know.

I wonder how many Saints back then would get MS70 and MS69 right off the mint press vs. today....look at how near-perfect so many of the 2009 UHRs came out.  We've come along way with technology, metallurgy, polished finishes, etc.

Yeah, that's got to be 20-30x power.  I may buy a more powerful lens just to study mint marks and/or close-ups of die cracks.   My current lenses are good for looking for major imperfections when I'm considering buying a coin.

I think on the 1915-S section I just finished you actually used the phrase "steel failure" for the first time (it was implied elsewhere).  These dies are pretty small I take -- a few inches ? -- and to take 150 tons of striking pressure thousands of time....well, that's alot of force to absorb.

BTW, it seems like any striking imperfections in the coins get called a die crack.  I think this takes away from legit "errors" or major imperfections, like a double strike on a mint mark....or a major wiggly line in the same place before they either repair or replace a die. 

But that's just me.  They're interesting to see and study, but I'm not sure I would catalog them based on that (and certainly not pay more $$$ for the varieties).  JMHO.

Roger, what magnification is the book using to look at the die cracks and mint marks ?  I just finished the 1915-S chapter and I have that coin but my 8x mag couldn't really show me anything on the "S".

Got it...I think.   Thanks, Roger.

5 hours ago, RWB said:

Regulations required 2 people present to enter a vault, but not necessarily Mint Officers. In daily work the vault custodian and his assistant came and went largely at-will and it appears that the 2-person rule was often ignored.

You mean 1 of the locks was left open ?  Or maybe both ?  Or that the asst would give his key to the Cashier so he could go to the Vault with both keys ?

If both guys are personally liable for any theft, I would think neither would want anybody but themselves opening the lock unless that other person was their spouse or sibling. 

I'm beginning to understand how these guys lost an entire bag of 1928 DE's. 

5 hours ago, RWB said:

By the time of the 1933 DE fiasco, McKernan was dead.

Do you know when he died ?  Not seeing an obit or Wikepedia entry.