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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2429522, member: 19463&quot;]There were two ways of measuring weights of coin flans.&nbsp; Rarely, the mint would adjust a blank to be exactly what it was supposed to be.&nbsp; More often, the mint made a given number of blanks from a given weight of metal not worrying too much that some were a bit over and some were a bit under.&nbsp; Yesterday I made some cornbread muffins.&nbsp; My intent was to make eight muffins all the same but in fact what I did was take eight muffin papers and pour some batter in each one until I ran out of batter.&nbsp; With experience I can do this with some accuracy but it is no big deal since a half ounce one way or the other doesn&#039;t keep the things from tasting good.&nbsp; The mint was proabably a bit more likely to assign experienced metal pourers to working with gold and apprentices to the bronze line and, unlike muffins, it is hard to take a spoon and adjust the heavy ones down or the light ones up.&nbsp; Catalogs tend to give averages or theoretical numbers.&nbsp; Even today the US mint lists the five cent coin as 5.000g.&nbsp; Weigh ten brand new nickels and tell me how many weigh even 5.0 rather than 4.9 or 5.1.&nbsp; Today as in the time of Julia Mamaea there was a theory called &quot;Good enough for government work.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>The fancy term for striking coins so many to the pound is <i>al marco</i>.&nbsp; Weighing each one is <i>al pezzo</i>.&nbsp; The article below will tell you way, way more than you wanted to know.</p><p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/1443037/Weight_adjustment_al_marco_in_Antiquity_and_the_Athenian_decadrachm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.academia.edu/1443037/Weight_adjustment_al_marco_in_Antiquity_and_the_Athenian_decadrachm" rel="nofollow">https://www.academia.edu/1443037/Weight_adjustment_al_marco_in_Antiquity_and_the_Athenian_decadrachm</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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