23rd

This is my 23d letter as president.

The holidays are ahead of us and that means the FUN Show is not far behind. But this holiday season my mind is on working with the Carson City Mint museum on some metallurgical testing of their die steels. Why do I bring this up?? In January 1999, as builders were excavating behind the Carson City Mint, their backhoes were met with an unusual stiff clank. Accustomed to all kinds of noises and sound, the operator sensed something was different about this one. Hopping off his Caterpillar, he picked up an indistinguishable hunk of rusted metal.

“What’s this?” he wondered. The piece was so rusted and scaled up that it was barely even recognizable as a metal. Ken Hopple, the museum curator, commenced a cleaning operation on the piece, and after several exhaustive hours, lo and behold, found out it was a defaced Carson City die dated 1876. A frenzy ensued and after several hours dozens upon dozens more dies were unearthed. I met Mr. Hopple at this past summer’s ANA in San Francisco, where we outlined some metallurgical testing I might be able to help out with.

Until the discovery of these dies in 1999, as far as I know very few, if any dies produced during the run of Indian cent production are known to exist. Most of the dies recoveredin the Carson City hoard were from 1876, right in the heart of the Indian cent series. In fact the entire mintage of Carson City (1870 through 1893) falls in the range of the Indian cent run.

So far we have been able to do some preliminary testing which I can discuss.

1. Longitudinal macro-etch. An old Trade dollar die presumed to be from 1876 was sent to me already sliced longitudinally (along its length). To examine its grain structure we etched it in 50% HCl (hydrochloric acid) heated to 160F for 25 minutes—not something you want to try at home.

Examination of structure is important to metallurgists for a number of reasons, including homogeneous structure, uniformity of grain and so on. Also of importance is perhaps being able to glean any information of primary processing, such as what type of ingot the bar was forged from, what temperatures, etc.

A photo of the sliced die as-etched is shown here and considerable nonuniformity exists. Compare this to the same etching process used on a 2002 State Quarter die. This level of non-uniformity can greatly impact properties such as crack initiation and propagation. Subsequent testing will focus on the cause of this condition.

2. Full chemistry, including residuals. The first question any metallurgist worth his salt asks is, “What alloy is it?” or “What is the chemistry?” I’m no different. Two separate areas were chemically analyzed using Optical Emission spectroscopy. A discussion of these results will be detailed in the next issue.

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 yours I think if you accomplished all of this, it would pretty much represent the
full spectrum of testing and would make for a world-class metallurgical report. I am not sure how much if any of the above you'd like to see data on-- this would directly affect how much die steel would be needed.

I hope to see you at the FUN Show this January. The dates are 04 Jan through 08 January 2006. We will have a club table and also have a Club meeting on Friday, January 6th at 1 o’clock. Consult the FUN program for Room details. And if I don’t I hope you had a wonderful Holiday season.

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 email address is: cpilliod@msn.com