While going through one of my Gallery Mint Museum archive sets I found this group of 1796 quarter-dollar replicas we stuck. This was early on when I was still learning about heat-treating tool steel. Trying to stay true to the period of the originals, we used a simple water-hardening steel (W1). The quarters needed much more pressure than the thick coppers we’d been producing so the dies would cave in short into the run. it took several die failures to figure out that the hardening didn’t go deep enough. I added 50 degrees to the temperature and 1/2 hour to the heat soak to ensure it was hot enough. I also stirred it longer in the quench to ensure it was hard to the center. Coincidentally this paralleled the early US Mint experiences in its early stages.
This set is the complete set of die varieties from that fiasco. Most of those dies failed after around 75 pieces. We are offering all 16 of these die varieties as one complete set.
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$796.00Price
Out of Stock
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