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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ordinary Fool, post: 2655453, member: 85318&quot;]Thank you Sir, and your cordail graciousness is duly noted and appreciated. I&#039;ll put my Harper&#039;s Ferry finds here and perhaps your and Bryan&#039;s threads could eventually be merged. I agree on the Mt. Rushmore&#039;s being tough. The Blue Ridge ones are as well except when there are clashes in the finely mirrored fields.</p><p><br /></p><p>An aside, I would love to know how what technology is being used to make the dies for these complex mints. From time to time I fancy the notion of having the IGES wireframes for them and then rethink how much all that data would consume of my workhorse eventually turning my brain into clad coin obsessed mush!</p><p><br /></p><p>Surely there are cad drawings for these and the dies are designed/machine using Pro-E or something equally demanding and then any number of capable post processing packages?</p><p><br /></p><p>Or are they still doing the plaster stuff and mechanically linked reduction duplication?</p><p><br /></p><p>Over ten years ago I test flew, mostly just observed as it almost confused and frightened me, a small Citizen dual spindle 7 axis lathe, both spindles indexable with all the feed/spindle/workpiece change tricks, with live tooling capably and rapidly spitting out amazing tiny parts.</p><p><br /></p><p>In fact, I&#039;d say with some Renishaw probes to inspect tool wear programmed to chuck up another when it was shot, do some datum point checking, that machine could likely churn out amazing coins from billet and wickedly fast.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the same room there was a 5 axis dancing table mill whittling out a titanium human knee joint with mind boggling precision. The thought of programming that dancing table mill made my head hurt.</p><p><br /></p><p>What is available now, even without lasers, is far more amazing than those awe inspiring machines.</p><p><br /></p><p>Must take an engineers tour of the mint plant tool and die room.... I wonder if that can be arranged.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the way, I did catch the usb scope post and I only know about it what you do. Most I see offered start at way too much magnification for non-scientific work and have way too little optical card. A better smart phone from the last 2 or 3 years, typcially will have a much better camera than even the 14MP usb 3 scopes offered without all the usb limiting bottlenecks. Even with USB 3 connections (about 10 times faster than USB 2), the bottleneck is still an issue for large files and videos.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of those thru the eye-piece of your stereo might impress you. I would be surprised if you don&#039;t have a near-by pal with a top shelf Samsung or I-phone type of smartphone. Thanks again, Sir.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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