Proof Coins: Making Money Episode 7

[Music] so the difference what that proof coin is the process that it's going to be made different than what you would find in the circulation coin that you would get and change from a store so the blanks come in to us they're going to come in with a high hardness or the metal is going to be really tough and so what we have to do in order to work with that metal we're going to soften it and in order to soften it we have to use a kneeling furnace and with that annealing furnace it's really extremely high temperatures highs like fifteen hundred degrees and so what we want to do next is we're going to go ahead and rim the blank and what I mean by rim is we're going to move some of the metal out to the outer edge and what it does is it starts to square off that border force for striking through that process of annealing and with the temperature the heat metal some oxides are going to form and so what we need to do is we need to clean up the blank mouth so we have a process called burnishing but we use some mild soap and some other cleaning agents along with some media a small round CV like shades metal and he's burnish the blank and it cleans it up to remove those oxides it sort of evens out the surface and prepares it so that we can move it to the next crossbow so stamping and so we've got the blank the next thing to do is get to die but what we do here is a process called finishing the die and so we have a group of specialists we're able to create what's called a cameo appearance on that die and that's a two-tone look so it'll have a mirror-like finish on the flat surfaces and then the artwork is going to be frosted and then that has to get protective for the stamping processes so it goes through what's called a PVD process that's a physical vapor deposition and in that process that's a layer of chrome a really hard layer that's just going to protect so now that we've got a blank that's prepared for proof and we've got a die that's prepared for proof we're able to go to the press and so these presses are going to be struck at height on each we're talking like on the average about 90 metric tons will strike it twice and in there with the border will be now completely squared off and all the detail and level of artwork is that into the the dye will come out and be transferred into the blank and now we've got a proof coin coming off the press

Channel: USMINT

Views: 101,495

Keywords: U.S. Mint, United States Mint, proof coins, proof, numismatics, San Francisco, annealing, burnishing, United States Department of the Treasury, America the Beautiful Quarters, gold, silver, penny, pennies

Id: LZMAY-53a-A

Length: 2min 27sec (147 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2017