Something different

[Jim8Mad]

Last weekend I saw something totally different at Knott's Berry Farm that I had never thought about, cut coins. I took Sharon's recommendation (in another thread) and picked up some jewelers blades and gave it a try myself. You can see plenty of mistakes in this picture, but I still had fun cutting it. I taped this one to a piece of 1/8" hard board for cutting and it seemed to work ok. The biggest problem I had was metal dust collecting just below the tape along my cut line making it hard to see exactly where I was supposed to make my turns. Next time I'm going to have to make something that will hold the coin more securely without using tape. The finished coin was 'taken' by my mom within minutes of finishing. At least she let me get some pictures first.

The jewelers blades I used seemed to be really brittle. The first one that broke left three small pieces on my saw. The second blade broke while I was tensioning it and also left a few small pieces on the table. Either I picked up some bad blades, or they are really that brittle.

[lucky788scroller]

Looks great, specially for a first try at it. It was a quarter, now what is it? a dime? Dale

[PuzzledMoose]

That is great, Jim. So how many blades did it take in the end to cut that quarter?

Where I used to live in England there was a guy who used to cut coins and make pins, earrings etc out of them. I bought my sister a pair of earrings from him and managed to get ones with her birth year on them - as in the picture below - though these ones aren't cut . He'd cut all the way round the ship on the ha'penny - though not the internal cuts on the rigging

He seemed to do a really good business with them. He cut with a jeweller's hand saw though!

Mostly he used out of circulation old UK coins - pre-decimal (when we had pounds shillings and pence) I'm not sure if there's any legal reason in the UK why current coins shouldn't be cut. I seem to think that I read somewhere that in the US it's OK as long as you're not defacing them for fraudulent reasons.

You have a lot of interesting designs in the US for cutting - especially with all those new state quarters that have been coming out. I'd like to see more..

[Jim8Mad]

The place I first saw these had many different coins available from all over the world. I even saw that half penny cut out. He did earrings, necklace charms, broches, money clips, and just coins (which he called golf markers). He also finished them differently, some polished as is, some dipped in sterling silver, and other gold plated or partially plated for contrast. It was simply amazing and I don't think I will ever get to his level of expertise and detail. He did them all with a hand saw also!

With this one quarter I broke 2 blades. I wanted to do more detail and cut out a bit more of the background, but wasn't really sure of myself just yet. The next one I try hopefully will have more cut from it for better details.

Before cutting this I had my doubts of the legallity of this. I did some research and found what you said, that it's ok to do this for the purpose of making art or jewelry, but illegal if done with intent to defraud.

I don't know if i will keep at the cutting of coins, but it is fun and interesting. Since I'm in the Navy I have collected lots of foreign coins from around the world giving me lots of other options and challenges in the future.

[PuzzledMoose]

Get hold of one of these, Jim - it's got a dirty great access hole in it already!