How Its Made - The 2 Euro Coin (€2)

heading for the Sun well if you're going in Europe you'll need euros they were designed to prohibit counterfeiting and use an external ring and a sophisticated sandwich of metal for the filling life of these high-tech coins starts out here this enormous scrap metal junkyard where mountains of recycled copper are being prepared for use they're squeezed by an immense hydraulic ram which makes giant cubes of the stuff weighing in at 8 tonnes each they're then sent to the foundry where the copper is melted down molten copper leaves the furnace at 1,200 degrees Celsius emitting brilliant green flames but this is only the first step we've got the copper into a workable form but there's still plenty more to do first the metal must be cooled the two enormous slabs that emerge from the machine weigh 70 tons between them and you could press about 2 million coins from them and all their chopped up into 5 metre long chunks then it's time for some hot rolling to hot roll the metal it's heated to about 900 degrees Celsius that's the heartbeat then the metal is pressed back and forth between a series of rollers to spread it out hot metal is far easier to manipulate and cold so by pressing it through the rollers the factory ends up with a really long sheet of copper this form is far better for making coins than a big lump the next stage is to clean the metal the heating and cooling have given the copper a dirty color so now it's scraped clean and once again it's sent back to the presses by the time they roll it up like a very shiny roll of toilet paper it's almost 400 meters long copper is just one small part of the technology behind 1 & 2 euro coins to buy a drink some chocolate or even a train ticket the machine must know you put the right money into it - the coins are measured and tested rigorously the most important test is how magnetic the coin is and that's the high-tech bit different metals have different magnetic fingerprints the two euro special characteristic is the filling for its hole this is made up of three layers of metal compressed together there's copper on the top and bottom and the middle is nickel to make this filling the different metals are fed into the machine and compressed together so hard they can't be separated from this sandwich of metal we can now start to stamp out some coins this press hammers the sheet 250 times a minute as it cuts the fillings for the big 2 euro coins if you look closely you'll see the nickel sandwich with copper alloy on top nickel in the middle and copper alloy on the bottom meanwhile in another part of the factory another machine is stamping out the outer rings these big hoops will be filled with the copper nickel sandwich the middles that have been removed will be returned to the furnace to start the process all over again the rings are a little dirty but a quick bath in acid mixed with ball bearings grinds away the filth leaving them sparkling and ready to be turned into money so we've got our outer rings and we've already made up their fillings but there's still something missing all of our pieces are blank bits of metal a template is needed to turn them into coins the engravers job is to make the coin equivalent of a rubber stamp this permanently marks the value onto the coin use an industrial press he crushes a pattern onto the stamp block it exerts 160 tons of pressure so he's got to be very careful the stamps are hardened in this furnace at 870 degrees Celsius without this treatment the motif would disappear very quickly once it's been hardened each stamp can engrave as many as 200 thousand coins the surfaces are scraped clean using fine glass to remove any imperfections then they're checked and polished before being put to work the stamp is fitted into the machine however at this point we don't have any complete coins to stamp but everything's a banks have come together the ring is put into place and the filling dropped into the hole the two are then placed under the stamp which hammers them together this both impresses the value onto the coin and compresses the two pieces together what emerges from the pipe is a brand new two euro coin ready to be spent so by crushing together some ordinary copper and nickel we end up with the elegant sophistication of the high-tech two euro coin

Channel: Triwood1973

Views: 4,273,708

Rating: 4.7231865 out of 5

Keywords: How, its, made, €2, two, euros, coin, minting, process, europe, european, countries, currency, money, cash

Id: rFDsSMDeV3w

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/jigga_wut]

"Hi-tech coin" lol

[u/TightTightTightYea]

So much resources wasted... Not to mention <0.10€ coins which posses almost no practical value.

[u/trader1010101]

that's the stupidest thing I have ever seen lol

[u/Clorox_Energy_Drink]

It already looks ridiculous right now.

[u/knifepatrol]

"It's time for some hot rolling!"

[u/Epicurus1]

I always wondered how they made a plumbus.

[u/SeymourBits]

1:45 "a very shiny roll of toilet paper" - well said, sir... bwahaha!

[u/talanhorne]

Forget fifty years. We may see the disintegration of the Euro currency within five or ten years.