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Title: QUALITY COINS Post by: Mike on February 05, 2014, 07:25:16 PM with todays modern tools for making coin dyes superb coins are produced , it always amazes me the quality of ancient coins .
how on earth did they manage to get such great detail into their coinage is just amazing as in the solidus of Hadrian below :o :o Title: Re: QUALITY COINS Post by: Dale on February 05, 2014, 07:48:02 PM It also amazes me, especially the gold hammered sovereigns.
Title: Re: QUALITY COINS Post by: probono on February 06, 2014, 09:36:08 AM When I was a child, my father used to tell me that they used youngish children (sometimes using gems as imperfect lenses) who could look at these things very closely.
On some coins you can see a scribe line inner circle, so at least for these there was a 'you can make your design in this space' and then have the legend following the outer edge of the inner circle (I'll have to see if there are any examples on the coins I have). I'm sure I've also heard that some of the dies were hubbed - i.e a master die was prepared and then this was struck into a number of other dies, whcih then had their details sharpened. I also think that the reverses were more likely to be prepared by the 'juniors' and the obverse (the most important bit) by the old pros. If anyone is interested I could post some images I have of coins taken at reasonable magnification using a Scanning Electron Microscope. |