Had coin club this week, picked up a few coins, trying to get a large bronze to go along with my denarius or Antoninus. Looks like a lot of these big bronze are clipped. Gordon lll 238 - 244..AD. Ae Sestertius.. Ob. laur., drapped bust right.. Rev.Victory advancing right, holding wreath and palm.. Mint..Rome 30mm x 14.50g...Clipped Not to much tooling going on..
I like it. I have a special place in my heart for these large, circulated, but problem-free coins. Jerry calls them comfort coins, and I like that term. I've only got a couple, of Philip I and Philip II, but I hope to add a few more as time goes by. Btw, I don't think it's clipped - that's just the way the flans were cast. You see a lot of them with the same shape.
Thanks guys, I would like those that know, are these clipped or made this way, i to see a lot of these big coins like this..
The molten metal was poured into plaster casting trees that had overflow runners, the idea being that the slag that formed at the leading edge wouldn't eventually become part of the flan. Once the casting tree cooled, the flans were cut off the sprues, leaving square edges where the runners connected to the flan. The flans were further machined in various ways before striking, sometimes resulting in even squarer shapes.
Furthermore, the overflow chamber may have served the dual purpose of allowing some of the metal to flow back into the flan chamber as it cooled and contracted. That's pure conjecture though, based only on my admittedly poor knowledge of metal casting.
Check out this site for more information. It's actually a discussion of the lathe machining of Greek bronzes, but there is some discussion of flan casting. This is only the first page - you've got to click on the next two for the discussion of flan casting. http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html There are coiners in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) that make coins in the ancient style today, so some of the theoretical metalworking ideas come from contemporary experiments. At some point, I'd like to get in touch with one of those coiners and perhaps do some apprentice work myself to get a feel for the process.
I recently purchased a poor quality RR denarius from CNG where the reverse depicts the tools used for making coins. I purchased it just for that reason.
