Any images of US Mint equipment?

I guess I could throw in a couple from my collection.

 

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So, @dcarr how about them? Ever heard of Taylor & Challen? Hordern, Mason and Edwards presses? Those were British firms, right?

 

Almost

Here are several:
http://www.moonlightmint.com/artifacts.htm

 

I'm not familiar with those brands of presses.

The US Mint used Morgan & Orr presses during the latter 1800s, and possibly Ferrachute brand as well.
At some point they switched to Bliss presses up through the 1970s or early 1980.
My Grabener press was in service at the Denver Mint from 1986 to 2001, at which time the Denver Mint switched over to horizontal-acting Schuler presses.

 

Someone posted this a while back.

 

Last I knew the mint still did blanking of nickels through dollars in house. Copper plated cent planchets ready to strike have been provided by Jarden since 1982. (And it was a shipment of those planchet that got scattered in DE.) Dollar planchets were provided ready to strike by an outside firm for the first year or two of the Sac dollar (Olin Brass I believe). Since then they have just provided strip.

The deal with the developing foundry to provide planchets would be a new contract and not something dealing with the current nickels. It may be possible that their equipment couldn't blank steel strip for nickels, And is it possible the steel nickel planchets would be barrel plated like the current cents? The Mint does not have the capability to do the barrel plating so if they did the blanking they would have to ship the planchets out again.

No not in use, the mint got rid of the last of their foundry equipment back in the 1970's.

 

I think this is a reduction lathe. I'm not sure.

 

Yes it is.

 

What does the U.S. Mint still do from this old film?

 

What are the NEW nickel alloy plans?

 

A brand new alloy of stainless steel that is being developed just for coinage. Whether it also becomes the outside layer on the clad coins hasn't been discussed yet. The knock on stainless is that it is difficult to strike well. Well, they seem to have fixed that. I've seen test strikes. They strike up pretty nice.

 

Very, very little of it. Pretty much just the striking itself and even that's now done much differently. They don't even do plaster artwork any more - it's done digitally. The making of working dies from a master hub is still pretty much as shown here, but that too can be done digitally if they want to - and for limited production runs, they want to.

 

I posted that one. It was in the Nevada Appeal. It's the Carson City mint press #1 being hoisted into or out of the SF mint archives. It was originally sent into storage in SF, and brought back out when the CC mint was turned into a museum. I believe the date on this photo is circa 1955.

 

Side note - today both Schuler and Gräbener are parts of the Andritz group. Here is a CoinsWeekly article, published three years ago, about where Schuler makes its presses ...

Christian

 

Sorry for not responding sooner but the site wouldn't accept my reply post on this thread.


A few of the artists still do some hand modeling in clay and plaster.

They may do the galvano reductions to hubs on the reducing machines sometimes but today most of the master hubs are cut directly from the computer images with the computer controlling the cutting head.

The hubbing of the dies as shown at 3:10 is still done. Different equipment but the same procedure.

At 6:40, they show blanking of the strip. As far as I know they still do this for everything except cents, but the strip is from outside suppliers.

The annealing, and cleaning of the blanks is still done. they don't show the upsetting of the blanks but that is still done there.

And of course the striking of the planchets. The film shows vertical striking, today's presses strike horizontally so the slow motion action of the feed fingers no longer occurs. (I don't know how they get the planchets to feed into the coining chamber on a horizontal press.)

They do still inspect for errors but not by hand. Basically nost of it is done by riddlers that sort out and reject pieces that are off size.

The still count and bag coins but today it is done into ballistic bags that hold literally around a ton of coins each.

 

Digitally I know what you mean here is the machine.

 

Here are a couple more machines that you mentioned.

 

Wow... So cool, what a massive undertaking. You must've had everybody including your cousins brothers uncle helping accomplish this feat. Thx. for sharing.

 

Only child.

 

Please share what the machines are.