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<p>[QUOTE="dougsmit, post: 3233778, member: 19463"]Good job! The GAL at the start would sucker many people into glossing over the lack of an A and calling the coin a Galerius when it clearly reads Maximinus. This coin is also very educational in another way. It is a perfect example of a weak strike. The thin flan needed to be hit much harder to fill the enters of the dies. You can tell there is little wear from the wreath and hair detail at top of head but there is no detail on the middle of the head where the die was most deeply cut. On the reverse, note the textured area just right of the torso. Not only did it not transfer the detail of the arm but it did not flatten out the rough surface of the cast flan blank. Still, the coin has great sharpness in the legends and peripheral detail. How could this be? My best answer is that the dies did not match exactly in the flatness of their surfaces. This is what you would get if the reverse die were just a little concave. The weak strike was enough to make contact with the edges but not in the recessed middle. Now, I have to wonder if this concavity was the same for all coins struck with this die or, perhaps, did the die swell a bit as it heated up with repeated strikings so the later coins might do better in terms of evenness. I am no expert on matters of technical die numismatics. It is not a subject of interest at all to 99% of collectors except that they would not find any interest here and would avoid the coin like the plague. If your son grows up to be a PhD in metallurgy or applied physics, blame this coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>Below is a coin showing the opposite situation. [ATTACH=full]845143[/ATTACH] This AE36 of Rhodes had dies that were slightly convex so when they came together the centers were struck more completely than the edges which are substantially unstruck. In either case, the coin would have been better if it had been hit harder and forced more metal into all parts of the die. Perhaps the hammerman was tired that day. It required a lot of muscle to hammer out large bronzes.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="dougsmit, post: 3233778, member: 19463"]Good job! The GAL at the start would sucker many people into glossing over the lack of an A and calling the coin a Galerius when it clearly reads Maximinus. This coin is also very educational in another way. It is a perfect example of a weak strike. The thin flan needed to be hit much harder to fill the enters of the dies. You can tell there is little wear from the wreath and hair detail at top of head but there is no detail on the middle of the head where the die was most deeply cut. On the reverse, note the textured area just right of the torso. Not only did it not transfer the detail of the arm but it did not flatten out the rough surface of the cast flan blank. Still, the coin has great sharpness in the legends and peripheral detail. How could this be? My best answer is that the dies did not match exactly in the flatness of their surfaces. This is what you would get if the reverse die were just a little concave. The weak strike was enough to make contact with the edges but not in the recessed middle. Now, I have to wonder if this concavity was the same for all coins struck with this die or, perhaps, did the die swell a bit as it heated up with repeated strikings so the later coins might do better in terms of evenness. I am no expert on matters of technical die numismatics. It is not a subject of interest at all to 99% of collectors except that they would not find any interest here and would avoid the coin like the plague. If your son grows up to be a PhD in metallurgy or applied physics, blame this coin. Below is a coin showing the opposite situation. [ATTACH=full]845143[/ATTACH] This AE36 of Rhodes had dies that were slightly convex so when they came together the centers were struck more completely than the edges which are substantially unstruck. In either case, the coin would have been better if it had been hit harder and forced more metal into all parts of the die. Perhaps the hammerman was tired that day. It required a lot of muscle to hammer out large bronzes.[/QUOTE]
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