A friend in Korea took some photos of a Hordern, Mason & Edwards (HME) Coinmaster 2 minting press at the Korean numismatics museum. The Hordern, Mason & Edwards press dated from the 1950s and was a further development of the Greenwood & Batley design which placed a knuckle mechanism below the striking area of the dies in order to overcome the problem of lubricant spillage from the knuckle action onto the feed table. The frame of the press was made of a strong, but light, steel construction. The entire frame (the part that protrudes upward, with springs on top) reciprocated vertically against springs, providing for longer life of the coining dies due to its elasticity, compared to older presses. This coining press also utilized a new rotary feed-plate mechanism that fed the coin blanks into the press more rapidly. This press was just sitting in an anteroom somewhere in the museum surrounded by mops and buckets. The room where it's housed is obviously now used as a storage closet. It seems that they pulled this machine off of the factory floor some time ago and were using it to strike tokens for visitors, hence the silly "hand" sticking out of it. The green-colored HME press is an image of these Korean presses at work in 1985, while the black-and-white image is from the 1970s.
