Scenes from the Berlin Mint, 1876

 

The illustrations below show what was at the time a state-of-the-art mint, that of Berlin , Germany . Still using a lot of skilled hand-work, they show the highlights of the processes between raw bar and planchets ready for the press.

 

Bars of the proper fineness were typically cast as narrow and thin as practicable with several trips through the rollermill, each time brought progressively thinner. We should note that guides on the rollers forced the strip to lengthen - but not widen - on each trip. This was because widening would cause the fineness to change across the face. Since rolling hardened the strip, it would have to be periodically "annealed" - heated and allowed to slowly cool to soften it. For some denominations, there might be as many as a dozen passes through the rollers and two or three annealings.

 

 

Lt. Top: Annealing strip Rt. Top: Rolling strip

Lt. Bottom: Punching blanks from strip Rt. Bottom: Rimming blanks

 

The punching of strip was skilled handwork. Large coins might be punched out in line, medium ones staggered, small ones a couple side by side. It had to be done rapidly, without "clips" and with as little wastage of the strip as possible. The punched-out strip - "scissel" - was returned to the melting furnaces.

 

The rimming machine turned a raw metal roundel into one with a rim and was sometimes modified to do the edge-marking as well. The coin presses demanded planchets of an exact diameter. Between the rimming and press, the planchets were again annealed, cleaned by "pickling" with a mild acid solution, washed, dried and polished. Only then were they ready for the press.

Wayne Jacobs is a numismatic expert. Currently secretary and editor of the "Mid-Island Coin Club Numismatic Journal"of Nanaimo, Vancouver Island , British Columbia, he is the award winning author of numerous articles. The MICC journal are hosted here: MICC webpages Copyright 2006 Wayne Jacobs. This article may be reprinted freely for non commercial purpose only if the resource box is left intact, linking back to us.