Process for mass producing Japanese 500 yen coins
theawesomer.com
theawesomer.com
Fun fact: "Mint" condition coins actually are measured on a 10-point scale (from 60 to 70...because...reasons...as part of a broader 70-point scale also because reasons).
In the video, note how the finished coins are unceremoniously ejected into a big bin straight after striking. During that process, many of the coins get little nicks and bumps and scratches. This has been the way for hundreds of years.
Because of this, most of the mass-production coins out there are far from perfect. So even among a group of coins literally hot off the presses, truly perfect ones (graded 70) are super hard to find. In the world of vintage coins (non-modern era - generally pre-1900), perfect 70s simply don't exist, and 69s go for $hundreds of thousands (or $millions).
This is different for modern coins, particularly for issues where the mints are marketing them specifically for collectors. 70s are easy to find. But for the true workhorse mass-market coins, perfection is not the norm.
Yup, I was very disappointed with the video in TFA.
Here's a proper factory minting a proper coin:
Larger denominations of precious metal backed currency like gold bricks can be considered coins, it’s rather arbitrary as to when something is to large to be considered a coin.
Don't forget the + grades (MS64+ etc) - 19 different types of mint condition!
I did a tour, they mentioned how a bunch of the low end labour used to wear "ugg" boots which are ankle boots made of sheepskins, wool-side inside. They made great stow-away for a few $2 coins from time to time, no clinking because of the wool. But if you got too greedy the boots started to sag...
I suspect it's apocryphal. Ugg boots sag anyways.
To the high-tech machines: the CSIRO (national science and technology research and tech commercialisation body) did work on high energy beam deposits, to make the die surfaces last longer. They were on the brink of exploring holographic coin prints when I went round, having just done bimetallic inserts and colour. At the rate of stamping, you loose the fine detail on the queen's face very quickly. The trial of the pyx is about this kind of qualitative judgement: Is this coin manufacture good enough to be kept as a mint?
At least one escape caper film (French?) has them use the aluminium coins as welding rod, making a digging tool to get out of the cell (using 200v sparks from bare wires to weld bits of metal together) -francs outre-mer I saw in Noumea were aluminium, featherweight coins.
The 1 yen coin is so light it will float on water.
The jokes about the cost of making a coin exceeding its face value (Pratchett) have some validity. Coins are solid expressions of value but their utility is their movement more than their actual denomination. Hence currency..
A case in Brisbane involved a parking-meter attendant who had a gambling habit and sifted coins out of the street meters to put into slots. hundreds and thousands of them, over a career. If you steal below some threshold, the back end smarts (pre-digital) didn't "see" the discrepancy between meter state, and cash inputs. Probably some smart stats showed the anomoly, and then time series analysis showed when it cropped up.
All to pull a lever.
A lot of people worked really hard to make that lever feel really, really attractive to pull.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/production/materials/thin-f...
Maybe they used other collaborations for the other stuff.
The thing that confused me though: why punch out the middle, only to put it back in again? It doesn't look like they're made from dissimilar metals like Euros?
Must be a huge headache upgrading all those machines. But then I can understand you'd want to keep the 500-yen coin hard to counterfeit since it's quite high-denomination.
But slowing it to 0.75x seems to work.