22nd

This is my 22st letter as president.

Another summer of coin fun behind us. The big event was the ANA Money Show in San Francisco. The most interesting aspect of the show was location. It has been quite some time since the last West Coast ANA and it was good to see some old faces as well as meet some new ones as well. We had a Fly In meeting attended by 10 members and guests. I was busy trying to set up a slide show for a talk on counterfeits, so I wasn’t able to record all attendees. The following were present.

Rick Snow, Past Fly-In President and President of Eagle Eye.
Chris Pilliod, President
Ken Hill, veteran member and collector from Seattle.
Xan Chamberlain, Indian cent error collector from California. The neatest piece I picked up at the show was a counterfeit 1870 Indian Cent from Xan which had three dates showing!
Charmy Harker, “The Penny Lady”, a friendly collector/dealer from California.
Sam Till, a guest.
A few other guests as well.

But perhaps the most interesting person I met was an employee of the Carson City Mint in Nevada. Ken Hopple has a passion about the Carson City Mint that is unrivaled. At the ANA I was a guest speaker at the Sundman Lecture and delivered a history of how die manufacturing has progressed over the years since the Mint inception in 1792. The talk covered the actual manufacturing process as well as some basic metallurgy. Afterwards, Ken came up to introduce himself. He seems to wear a lot of hats over there but perhaps the most fascinating of them is curator. And as such, he has been incharge of restoring the cache of Carson City dies unearthed during excavation in 1999. If you have not heard of this find, here is a brief history as supplied by Ken.

“An important piece of history of the Carson City Mint was brought to light in 1999 when, during excavation of the Woodrow W. Loftin Park, contractors discovered cancelled coin dies buried behind the former mint
building, which is now the Nevada State Museum. Further inspection using ground conductivity sensors determined 500 cancelled dies had been disposed of in this manner. The dies were dumped from at least two
separate containers and mixed in with sheet iron, pipe, brick and sandstone fragments. The dies, once clean carbon steel, were now rusted from years of oxidation in the soil. Ken Hopple has been working with
Dr. Gene Hattori, Curator of Archaeology at the Nevada State Museum, to restore the dies recovered in an attempt to discover more about the operations of the Carson City Mint. After excavation, the rusted dies
are put in WD-40 to prevent further rusting. The die is eventually cleaned... and the once rusty die reveals its secrets. It is amazing how much detail is left on the face of many of the dies. Some of the
dies can be identified as obverse, some reverse... and some can not be identified at all. Sometimes only the measurements of the die will determine its denomination. If enough detail is present, Ken will make
an impression of the die in an anodized aluminum/ lead alloy material. The dies were cancelled when retired by the mint to prevent counterfeit coins from being made. This was done in a blacksmith's shop. The dies
were heated in a forge and when red hot were struck with a chisel once or twice across the face of the die. Still, the resulting impression can offer archaeologists and historians clues to which dies were used
for which coins. All the dies excavated will eventually be cleaned, catalogued and stored for further research.”

Ken mentioned they were trying to obtain testing on some of the dies they had found but due to the expensive nature of high-quality metallurgical testing, they could not find the funds for initiating them. That’s when I mentioned that I was a metallurgist for a large steel company and perhaps we could help them out. We have a very large testing lab equipped with just about every imaginable testing device any metallurgist could ever dream of. So it became a matter of running the request up the flagpole of managers to get a formal approval for the work. Hopefully we will get approval and once approved Ken will overnight mail me some dies to begin slicing up for testing.

Now, why might you ask, is this important for Indian Cent collectors. Here’s why. The Carson City Mint operated only from 1870 until 1891-- this represents the heart of the Indian cent era. So that the diemaking employed for any Carson City dies would be similar to what was done for Indian cents as well. Keep in mind that up until the last 20 years all dies made for the Branch Mints came from Philadelphia, of course including those used in Philadelphia. Those made for the Branch Mints headed out via the courier service of choice at the time. My guess any Carson City dies headed out via train or perhaps the Pony Express if they were in a hurry. A lot of communication between Carson City and Philadelphia was done via the telegraph. (In one of the more poignant ones I read, Philadelphia asked if they could help with Carson City’s problems by sending some personnel out. Carson City responded by asking, “You got anybody that talks less, and listens more?”

Now we have as researchers virtually no knowledge of diemaking and die metallurgy at the Mint during this time. There are no records available to us and everything must be learned empirically. And to find a genuine die to test???!!!! Stumbling onto a genuine Mint die from the 1800’s occurs about as often as I got a date in college (OK, you’re right, the dies are not as rare). So to be able to firsthand orchestrate testing on a piece of history like this is truly a lifetime experience for a metallurgist/numismatist. Below is a description of the testing I hope to accomplish:

1. Longitudinal macro-etch. As you can see from the photo an old Trade Dollar die from 1876 is already cut longitudinally.
2. Transverse STC (surface-to-center) grain size. Grain size is a
critical variable for fatigue life, which is critical for prevention of crack growth. A small grain size is helpful in that it requires any crack that initiates to propagate along a much longer path. Imagine driving your car and every block having to make a 90-degree turn vs heading straight down an expressway. It is affected by how much hot working or forging is done to the piece, so this will also give some insight into how much hot working was forged into the die prior to hubbing, and
perhaps (a longshot) at insight into original cast ingot diameter as well.
3. Longitudinal and transverse tensile testing.
4. Full chemistry, including residuals.
5. Rockwell hardness longitudinal/transverse profile. This may yield
insight into how the die was hardened/ how it was quenched and tempered.
6. Impact data. I found in the literature that Izod testing was
performed on alloy W2, which I suspect !800-era dies to have similar chemistry. This
is a test for metallurgical toughness, or resistance to fracture
propagation.
7. JK testing. This is a test for steel cleanliness, which is critical
for a number of important considerations including polishability (how
smooth or mirror-like the die face can be polished), fatigue or crack
propagation, toughness and other variables as well.

There are a number of additional tests we would run for a variety of other
metallurgical properties, but for the family of die steels such as this, this represents the full spectrum of testing and would make for a world-class metallurgical report.

As the project stands right now, I am awaiting approval from our management to conduct tests, then add another month for testing. The difficult portion will likely be interpreting the results as there is nothing to benchmark against. Any results obtained will be published in several locations, but unquestionably will be shared here with other members.

Fly-In Club Editor
Frank Leone
P.O. Box 170
Glen Oaks, NY 11004 email:flrc@aol.com

If you would like to share any thoughts, my new email address is: cpilliod@msn.com