RWB

Good luck with your new venture!

Her comment was likely accurate per hour up to WW-II, especially in the factory towns in and near Appalachia. Factory and mine owners knew they had a captive worker population and exploited them to the max. They still do.

Accuracy was determined not only by the stepping of gears/worms, but by the ability of alloys to remain homogeneous when finely machined. An analogous situation was assay fineness at the Mint. Routine reports were to the 1/1000th (0.001) but 1/10,000th (0.0001) was possible -- unfortunately neither was consistently repeatable in practice until the 1890s, or later. There's a mint discussion in 1908 of dividing a new DE into 8 parts and assaying each part -- they were almost all different when reported to the 1/1000th.

The real question is "How long would you have to work in 1940 to earn the money to buy a collector's coin?" How much work did it take to pay your other bills? How many wage earners in a family? Etc., etc. That is, dollar buying power is only indirectly affected by consumer price inflation.

YouTube is filled with garbage about coins. Very little posted there about coins is true and there is no way for a novice to separate the very few truthful posts from all the lies. Your Ike dollars are worth $1 each -- nothing more. There are a very, very few -- possibly 5 coins - that are valued highly because they are patterns or in close-to-perfect (MS-70) condition. Other people own them.

Fake. Worthless -- except possibly as a drink coaster.

Yep, you are correct. As already noted, it is a worthless fake.

Y9u are being lied to. They are worth $1 each.

A horse was illustrated on Irish coins beginning with the first issues of the the Republic. The 20p is commonly available, but there are earlier designs. Photos should be available on the internet.

Everything was mechanical, but that does not mean primitive. Water wheel and steam power allowed a large investment in metal forming and cutting tools. Standard precision was 1/1000th inch and 1/10,000th was attainable. Abrasion and wear were hard to control, and maintenance was often short-changed by packing with stiff lubricants. If you examine the Franklin Peale press drawings, you can quickly understand how the machine worked, and possibly where improvements could be made. Over time, equipment builders often added changes in layers rather than redesigning equipment. One of the most fascinating areas of equipment technology (in my view) was in weaving and cloth manufacture - early combination of machines and "programming." Your questions are very interesting and as you can see, there are differences in how results were measured and expressed. The internet has lots of back issues of The American Machinist and similar publications that might be of interest.

It is likely that the foremen and others carried small packet notebooks with lists and tables of press settings, alloy charts, annealing times, etc. We have just a handfull of these from the 1890 and 1930s - they are packed with information not fond elsewhere. (See my book United States Proof Coins 1935-1942 for extensive data from one of the notebooks.) We also know that tests were (and still are) made when dies are changed or new designs introduced, and that the old branch mints were sent sample coin sets for guidance.

Agreed, Just Bob -- These special terms are meaningless in themselves, and are being tossed about with no justification. Label it s "specimen," then prove it was intended to be special by the makers.

"Why do people refuse to think logically about coins?" Coins have the same question about people.

There are examples of this kind of circulation review in some back issue of The Numismatist.

The two primary suggestions are: 1) plugged to increase total planchet weight. This allowed a light planchet to be put to use and not melted and rolled all over again. 2) plugged to adjust the total silver content up or down, again to allow use of an otherwise defective planchet. No evidence of this or any other 1794 dollar being the first one produced. If Rittenhouse and friends were trying to make something special, why use a patched planchet. Why select a planchet with adjustment marks? Maybe it looks so nice because the press slingers were feeling especially energetic, or put the beam weights out farther than usual, or.... ?

Hope this will help a little --- How do they calculate the area of the die? Does that include all 3 dies or just the striking die when they are talking about square inch? I'm guessing they are only talking about the face of the die also ain't it? Or the entire die? I wondered also how they figured how many tons was being applied. What kind of equipment was used to measure that sort of thing in the 1800s and early 1900s. Die area was calculated by the formula A=πr^2. Measurements were made inches, Avoirdupois pounds, and English tons (2,000 lbs per ton). Metric was not used. Pressure referred only to the face dies. There were no really accurate means of determining coin or medal striking pressure until the 20th century. There were a lot of ways to estimate and at least get approximately the same pressure for each coin diameter and alloy. Mint documents usually refer to pounds per square inch, but it is not always clear if this is an idealized number or calculated for the actual area of the dies. An example of confusion is between small cent and quarter eagle pressures. Both were made on small toggle presses and the actual force was nearly the same, yet some sources have very different pressures. This table, from the early 1930s indicates pressures based on die area, and is thus more nearly accurate than earlier ones. Notice that quarter eagle and dime pressures are the same, and cent pressure is just 5 tons greater. Coins of similar size used similar striking pressures. A toggle press produced the same force with every blow. Force was proportional to the size of the press and length of lever. A press of a certain size could produce only a limited range of striking pressure due to this mechanical limitation. Toggle presses had a wedge shaped spacer above the upper die. This controlled the amount of force (“pressure”) applied by the upper die to a planchet. (The lower dies was usually a passive part.) This wedge was moved in or out to change the working distance and thus the proportion of available pressure between die and planchet. (It’s a little like using a log splitting wedge – a small wedge will not split a large log, and a large wedge might rip apart a small log.) After hydraulic railroad wheel-set presses came into use, companies developed tables of force in tons necessary to bind wheels to axels. These quickly evolved into more general purpose tables showing the measured hydraulic force necessary to press machine parts and eventually strike coins and medals. We see greater consistency in Mint information after this time, although they are still estimates until the Philadelphia Mint acquired an hydraulic medal press in 1892 and put it in service the next year. Lengthy tests were made of coinage dies and alloys in order to calibrate toggle press size and wedge settings. The goal was more consistent coinage and elimination of guesses/opinion by press foremen.

From the photos, there appear to be too many scrapes, especially the one on Jefferson's cheek< and the dark spot to support anything higher than MS65 or 64....certainly not 68 with stars & stripes, or buttons & bows.

Es difícil saber el color correcto porque su foto no tiene un color conocido. Tome fotos sobre un fondo blanco, y tal vez los miembros puedan ayudar.

Very nice!

Good opportunity to scoop up the pests enmass, and turn on the meat grinders. Might reduce the turds dropping from Florida's trees -- at least for a while.

Now this -- "Florida is also expected to see some of its coldest temperatures in years, leading to iguanas - a cold-blooded lizard species - to become immobilized and fall out of trees." BBC News. Prepare for lower cat food prices !

I use chili and beans for that -- get the gas flowing just fine. Now, about that pilot light.

Not quite....Silver coins were not given any official mark in China or elsewhere. Silver coins were not used in any of the Chinese trade ports. All of these were private marks much like advertising tokens in the US or regulated coins (Brasher, etc). Silver coin also were not introduced for circulation, but as a way to transfer silver metal weight. When Chinese merchants received Mexican, US. British, Japanese trade dollars, they would, when possible, immediately melt them into syce which was the normal silver form used in South China. Chopmarks are not equivalent to wear, but possibly to the familiar mutilations mentioned above.

By mid-1932 almost all quantities of gold in public hands was in hoards. The general populace - rich or poor - seldom used gold coins. The rich used paper currency equivalents and checks, the poor never had any. Most international corporate payments were by letter-of-credit, transfer note, ear-mark and other non-physical gold and money movements.

I had approached it more as a casual affair - like with my secretary - rather than a formal discussion about paneling.