Fun in the sun

[glasseye]

September crown was great fun. After some initial insanity, we found a nice open camping spot right next to the king and queen. We had a bunch of people wandering through our camp on Saturday, but after that was largely curtailed aelfgyfu and hanksan arrived.

It was also a very productive event. I got the die for aelfgyfu's largesse coins completed, and learned several new techniques in the process:

* Dentillated borders - Fairly simple round graver work, but very good to know how to do since many period coins use it.
* Sculpting with a round graver - fun and rewarding! I can make all sorts of neat shapes.
* Creating lines by chasing with a chisel punch, without an engraved guide line - I found this frustrating and difficult. Chased lines with an engraved guide line aren't so bad, but this was entirely different.
* Anglo-Saxon style lettering - Big chisel punches = easy letters! I got all of the lettering done in just over an hour! The lettering for my mon die took over 12 hours.
* Burnishing - Another easy technique, but a good one to have in my toolbox. It's a scratch-eraser!

We only had time for a couple of test strikes, but there aren't any major problems. Now to crank out a bunch of coins for this weekend...




(That's the badge for the Order of the Jambe de Lion, An Tir's grant-level A&S order) I'm a ship!

Comments

Re: bezant stuff

[ornerie.livejournal.com]

uh oh...so we're looking at at least 25 cents each? this may be prohibitively expensive.

eek!

annisa_1380 is doing the calcualtions on how many we need and then we'll see...

good thing we're doing this now!!!

Re: bezant stuff

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's *just* the cost of silver, for paper-thin 10mm (less than half an inch) pieces. There is always the possibility that the spot price of silver could drop, but we can't bet on that, of course.

Now, we could do pewter. It will tarnish faster, but I can make darn shiny pewter coins, and they'd look brilliant for twelfth night, at least.

Re: bezant stuff

[ornerie.livejournal.com]

can you price it out for pewter like you did for silver? that way when Annisa figures out how many we'll need, we can present TRM with prices either way and then its up to them from there.

what were you planning on charging them for the dies? I know they're hoping to have them for gifty tokens for later...

Re: bezant stuff

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

This is more of an approximation, since pewter doesn't really have a standard spot price. $12/lbs seems about right for some suppliers, but maybe we can get it cheaper... these calculations use $12/lbs. That's $.0265 /g.

The pewter versions would be thicker. If they want to use them as coins later, they'll need to be about 0.6mm thick so that they don't bend when people handle them (though maybe we can get away with thinner if we do a fairly deep ridge circle... hm, I'll have to look into this). Also, if we do a smaller bezant, it could probably be thinner and still work as a gifty token later on.

Anyway, lets assume 0.6mm for now, if we go thinner the price will scale linearly:

20mm diameter:

(0.02m)^2 * (pi) * 0.0006m * 7310000 g/m^3 = 5.51g = $0.146 each

15mm diameter:

(0.015m)^2 * (pi) * 0.0006m * 7310000 g/m^3 = 3.10g = 0.0822 each

10mm diameter:

(0.01m)^2 * (pi) * 0.0006 * 7310000 g/m^3 = 1.38g = 0.0365 each


I was planning on doing the dies for free.

Re: bezant stuff

[ornerie.livejournal.com]

super info!!!

and thanks for donating the dies :). I thinkt hey're hoping to be able to strike/have struck coin tokens in teh future (not take them off the garments ;))