If the US Mint is required by Congress to make US dollars according to their weight requirements, then is this why modern coins seem to lack the design intricacies of classic and older coins? For example, the US silver dollar needs to weigh 26.73 grams. It would be easier to make designs where the device-to-field ratio is low (there are plenty of field spaces on the coin). I'd think it would be simpler that way, instead of making a bunch of designs then making test strikes to see if they weigh the required amount. Perhaps there was a change in mentality that led to the modern / classic divide, and that mentality stuck because it was easier to do. Is this why moderns look so plain and less intricate relative to classic coins? Or, what's the reason? Granted, classic coins were made with that weight restriction in mind, too. But, why the shift? It's as if better technology in more modern times meant less desire to employ more manual labor towards die/hub design - the relative difference between how everything else is done and the design efforts to simply meet the weight requirements may have made the manual designing process too much of a trial and error ordeal. And, when I look at commemoratives, there was a rather long break from commemorative coinage between the Booker T. Washington commemorative half of the 1950's and the 1983 George Washington commemorative half. For whatever reason this long commemorative recess took place, perhaps this two generation or so stoppage of commemorative strikes made the Mint lose its way, and it was easier to keep the designs simple to meet those weight requirements. Maybe the US Mint experienced a huge exodus of artists all at once, and there wasn't enough foresight to keep the artists and the commemorative program running. Or, perhaps the end of the Bretton-Woods system was already underway in the 1950's, and US Mint was one of the earliest signs of that (conspiracy or otherwise). Thanks in advance!
Post-1974 coins are flat chiefly because press speeds are so high there's no time to fill in deep designs. They've been getting flater and flater since even before 1964 though. Part of the reason as well is the harder composition wears dies faster than the silver so less metal movement is beneficial. There are many reasons the hobby has developed as it has and lower relief is probably a very minor issue since people just quit collecting circulating coins in 1964/5.
But in modern times, shouldn't we have sufficient technology to address these issues? Couldn't dies/hubs be milled by stock removal via computer-aided machinery? And, aren't the compositions the same as classics, per Congressional requirement? Unless heat treatment changed to improve the Rockwell hardness of coins to a noticeable amount, which I believe wouldn't be significant enough. Also, are the technological increases in coinage speed responsible for the modern designs? That could be a byproduct of it (e.g. the flatter, lower relief strikes), but modern coin designs themselves are less intricate than many if not most of the classic designs (e.g. fewer devices, fewer designs, more fields).
The only way to make metal flow into deep designs more quickly is by increasing die pressure. With current steel strenghts and modulus of elasticity very little extra depth would be possible without greatly increasing die failure and die wear. It can be done quite simply; remove the need for high speed. The pennies that are produced by the mint in enormous numbers every year require most of the productive capacuity of the mint. They crank them out by the countless billions and each one is a tiny little drag on the US economy. They are like throwing sand in the machinery. If this toxic slug were eliminated the mnint would have plenty of time to fill in all the deepest designs. They could even deepen the designs and the personnel and resources now wasted on pennies could be employed making better coins. The modern world is geared toward waste and low quality. As bad as coins are from the mint ya' shouldda seen them a few decades ago. Clad was being cranked out that was badly struck from worn dies that had been poorly hubbed. Today these are worn enough it can be hard to tell just how bad they were. People just didn't care what the coins looked like in 1970 so the mint didn't care either. Then when states quarters appeared the people did care and the mint has been improving quality for years now.
But couldn't the machines be set for lower speeds on denominations other than the penny? Thereby, keeping the penny speeds up and lowering the speeds particularly for the commemoratives and other select denominations. And, I remember a member on CT showing the increasing degradation of proof reliefs in the 2000's or so. The reliefs are lower, the cameos are stronger but appear to have flatter, muted designs that are seen more as abstract silhouettes than the intricate details seen on reliefs of its former year counterparts.
I can't speak to the proofs but the only way to slow the presses down for clads is to buy more presses.
Sure. They already use the highest tech steel in the world for dies. I believe it's in the $2000 per ton region and is used for things like hydraulic cylinders. There have been a series of breakthroughs in steel manufacturing for coinage dies dating back to about 1973. In the future there will be tougher materials but they've probably gone about as far as is possible with steel in terms of being able to increase relief with high press speeds. There's ongoing research, of course. Eventually they'll weave together a material that's far stronger than steel and can be used at even higher speeds and with greater relief.
There are only so many hours in the day. Do the math on how many they produced last year and how much time they have to make each individual coin
It's all about cost. I am not aware of how US mint is setup to strike coins but in some of the video footage that I've seen in Australian and Japan mint, a batch of dies are grouped together to strike coins at 600+ coins per minute. The priority remains as quantity over quality. I'm sure the US mint will love to hear your suggestion if you can improve quality without sacrificing quality as well as not increasing production cost. Sounds simple but I'm sure it's a lot harder than what many would believe it would involve.
@cladking speaks the 100% truth. I've seen ancient coins with far higher relief than anything the US mint has ever put out. Ancient dies didn't have to strike hundreds of thousands of coins, so they could get away with that. As for the degradation in proof manufacturing process, I think this post is probably what you're after.
The mint use to use single die vertical strike presses that could do 60 to 80 strikes per minute. They later modified or got new presses that allowed duel or quad die setups allowing hem to strike 120 to 320 coins per minute (Notice that is still 60 to 80 strikes per minute). Currently they use single die horizontal strike presses that run at 750 coins per minute. That is 13 coins per second. This brings us to the second problem. It has reached the point no matter how high you increase the pressure (even if the dies could survive it) you can't increase the relief. It takes TIME for metal to cold flow. At 13 coins per second there just isn't enough time for the metal to cold flow into deeper relief. The classic US coins were designed by people who not only understood die sinking, but were also sculptors. Most of the people in the current mints engraving program have their training in computer graphics or graphic arts, two dimensional design. Actually the hubs are now done that way. The designs are done on a computer screen and the hubs are directly milled by the computer. And it shows. The commemorative program ended because the government, and the collecting public, was fed up with all the corruption and scandals taking place in the commemorative programs. Due to the high production levels need for all the coin they all run at the high speeds. If the cents were eliminated it would free up production capacity and all of those presses could then be used for other denominations and speeds could be reduced Now for commemoratives there is no excuse for the low relief because those presses are not under the same high demand requirements. They could have high relief, but they are being designed by those two dimensional trained artists.
