Mending the Mint's Mistakes: Off-Center Strikes, Planchet Flaws, and the Collector's Eye
Dr. G. G. Wilkins uses his counterstamper's eye to explain how the Philadelphia Mint makes a cent, from rolled copper strip and punched blanks to worn dies, off-center strikes and clipped planchets, and he tells the grisly tale of a Barnstead coin-clipper who met Barnaby the bear. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister joins him with new stories about mint scrap on a cider-house roof, his own crescent-bitten rivets, and a faked 'error' cent bought at the Concord fair. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins ends by teaching listeners how to tell a mint flaw from a genuine Wilkins mark, one anvil strike at a time.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, settle your carcass, you four-hundred-pound hearth rug. That is a jar of spirit, not a jar of honey, and the fellow you smell on the turnpike is the mail rider, not your supper. Lie down, or I will pull one of your back molars for practice, and you know I own the forceps for it.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen mud, heavy body thumps down against the log wall
Wilkins: That is a good bear. A stupid bear, a flea-ridden, foul-breathed bear, but a good one.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue man with his ear pressed against my door. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, maker of spirits, and the only man in this county with his own name hammered into the national currency. Tonight we talk money. Not where it goes, because we all know it goes to the tavern, the taxman, and the widow who keeps the boarding house in Concord. Tonight we talk about how money gets made, and how the United States Mint in Philadelphia, with all its steam and all its clever men, still turns out pennies that look like they were struck by a drunk with one eye shut. Our topic: Mending the Mint's Mistakes: Off-Center Strikes, Planchet Flaws, and the Collector's Eye.
Wilkins: The law of the United States forbids making drinking spirits without a federal permit, so take tonight's talk as history and instruction for the curious, not as an invitation. Now a quick word from the man who pays for my lamp oil.
♪ Brisk banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still sealed with flour paste and a prayer? Stop the leak before the leak stops you! Moonshine Stills has Heavy-Duty Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, airtight and built for life, ready for you at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish resolves into a slow fiddle drone
♪ Fiddle sting, segment one
Wilkins: Segment the first. Sit close to the stove and I will tell you about the American cent, because I have handled more of them than any banker in Concord, and I have handled them with a hammer, which teaches a man more than a ledger ever will.
♦ Wax crackle; a handful of coins poured onto a pine bench
Wilkins: That sound is about forty cents of the nation's change, spilled on my bench. When I was a younger and handsomer man, which is to say before Barnaby and before the sheriff, the cent was a great fat slab of copper, near as broad as a half dollar. The Mint struck those big cents from 1793 straight through to 1857, and from 1795 onward each one weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains of copper. You could knock a squirrel off a limb with one. I have known men to use a stack of them as a hand weight and come out of the winter with a forearm like a ham.
Wilkins: Then Congress, which never met a good thing it could not shrink, passed the Coinage Act of February 21, 1857. It killed the large cent and the half cent dead in one stroke. In their place came a little Flying Eagle cent, eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, weighing seventy-two grains. Less than half the old metal for the same penny, which is the same arithmetic the Concord tavern uses on its rum. And that May the people of Philadelphia lined up outside the Mint like hogs at a trough, handing over their old Spanish silver and their worn-out big coppers to get the shiny new birds. A grand day. I am told several pockets were picked, one wife was traded, and a deacon sold his own hat for three eagles and walked home bareheaded in the rain, grinning like an idiot.
Wilkins: Two years later the Chief Engraver of the Mint, a Mr. James B. Longacre, put an Indian princess on the cent in place of the eagle. That is the Indian Head cent most of you carry. Now here is the rub, and it matters for tonight. That copper-nickel stuff is hard. Hard as a Calvinist's heart. It wore out the Mint's dies faster than a Methodist camp meeting wears out a mule, and many a coin came out weak, the feathers mushy, the date half-drowned. Mr. Joseph Wharton, who owns a nickel mine in Pennsylvania, loves nickel the way Barnaby loves ham: loudly, in public, and without the least regard for who is watching. But last year, by the Act of April 22, 1864, Congress went to bronze anyway, a softer, browner metal, and dropped the cent to forty-eight grains. Every time they change the recipe the penny gets smaller. By the time my grandchildren are grown they will be paying for their bread with copper flakes and a squint.
Wilkins: And the same year, Congress forbade private men from issuing one-cent and two-cent coins or tokens. That was aimed at the great swarm of copper store cards the merchants struck in '63, when nobody could find a real penny for love or whiskey. So Washington says no private man may make a cent. Fine. I never made one. I only improve the ones they make, with my name.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Now let me tell you how the Mint makes the thing I just improved, because you cannot see a mistake until you know the right way.
Wilkins: First comes the metal. In the early days the Mint could not even roll its own decent copper, and for years it bought ready-made blanks from Matthew Boulton's Soho works in Birmingham, England. Imagine that. A nation that whipped King George twice, buying its pennies from his blacksmiths. Today they roll their own strip. They melt the metal, cast it into bars, and run the bars through rolling mills over and over until they have a long ribbon of metal the exact thickness of a cent. Rolling hardens copper, so it must be heated to a dull red to soften it again. Copper is a forgiving metal there, more forgiving than any wife in Merrimack County: it softens whether you plunge it in water or let it cool on the bench, quite unlike steel, which you must treat just so.
Wilkins: Next comes the cutting press. It drives a round punch down through the strip, bang, bang, bang, and every bang drops a round blank. That blank is called a planchet. What is left of the strip looks like a lace collar on an old maid, all holes and no substance. The trade calls it scissel, and it goes back to the furnace or out the door as scrap.
Wilkins: Then the blanks are annealed, cleaned bright, and run through the upsetting mill, a machine that squeezes the edge and raises a little rim, so the coin will stack and wear well. Then they go to the press. Since 1836 the Philadelphia Mint has struck its coins on steam. A pair of hardened steel dies, one for each face, with a steel collar around them, comes down on that blank with the force of a dozen angry oxen. The metal flows like cold molasses into every line the engraver cut. Out drops a cent. Thousands a day, every one perfect.
♦ Wilkins snorts
Wilkins: Except when it is not. Because the Mint makes mistakes the way a Concord alderman makes speeches: steadily, expensively, and with the government's own metal.
♪ Banjo transition
♪ Fiddle reel, segment two
Wilkins: Segment the second: outlaws, legends, and men who did unspeakable things to the nation's money. And before my guest comes in, I owe you a story. It is about a coin-clipper.
Wilkins: Now, a clipper is the lowest form of crook in all creation, lower than a horse thief, lower than a Boston lawyer, lower even than the man who waters cider. A clipper takes a silver coin and shaves a hair off its edge. Then another, and another, until he has a little pile of silver filings and a pocketful of coins that look honest and weigh like liars. His cousin the sweater shakes gold coins in a leather bag all night and collects the dust off the bottom of the bag. Both of them thieves, both of them wearing the clothes of honest men.
Wilkins: Two autumns back a fellow from over Barnstead way, I will call him Ansel Pike since his mother still goes to meeting, came down the turnpike to Fort Wilkins to buy a jug. He paid in half dimes. Shiny as a bride. But I have weighed and hammered coin for twenty years, and I knew those half dimes the moment they hit my palm. Too light. Edges too fresh, with a little file burr you could catch your thumbnail on. I said, Ansel, these coins have been to the barber. He said, Doc, they are good as gold. I said, they are good as gold that was robbed on the way to church. And he snatched the jug and ran.
♦ Chain rattles hard, a deep bear grunt
Wilkins: Now Ansel had never been to Fort Wilkins before. Ansel did not know the geometry of Barnaby's chain. Ansel ran exactly the wrong way, out past the still-house window, into the one patch of mud where a bear with forty feet of chain has total sovereignty, like a little Russian czar.
Wilkins: Barnaby did not roar. That is the thing nobody tells you about bears. They do not roar. He just stood up, all seven feet of him, and went forward with a sort of bored, hungry grunt, the way a fat man goes toward a pie. He took hold of Ansel by the seat of the trousers. Wool, linen, drawers, and then Ansel himself. And when Barnaby pulled back, it made a sound like a boot being pulled out of April mud. A long, wet, sucking pop. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of good Barnstead wool and a piece of Ansel's hindquarter about the size of a pork chop. And Ansel? Ansel sang. He sang a hymn in a key the Baptists have not yet discovered, high and holy, and from the hole in his breeches out spilled every clipped half dime he owned, rattling into the mud like hail on a tin roof.
Wilkins: I hauled him into the shop, laid him face down across my anvil bench, poured a cup of tails over the wound to clean it, and stitched him up with waxed harness thread and a sail needle. Twelve stitches. He bit a leather strap clean through. And when I was done, with his breeches around his ankles and his dignity in a bear, he had the gall, the iron gall, to ask whether I would take clipped coin for the stitching.
♦ Wilkins laughs, a dry wheeze; the bear grunts in reply
Wilkins: I kept the half dimes. Barnaby kept the pork chop. Ansel kept walking a little sideways until Thanksgiving. And there is your lesson: weight never lies, and neither does a bear.
Wilkins: Now, I get my own troubles over coin. A Merrimack deputy once stood in my shop, red-faced and puffed like a bullfrog, and told me that stamping my name on a penny was defacing the coin of the nation. I said, Deputy, the nation defaced it first. Look at the date. Look at the feathers. Look at the crack running up the princess's cheek like a scar from a tavern brawl. The Mint made that wreck, and I am only adding my signature to the confession. He had no statute to show me, I had a bear to show him, and the conversation ended in a draw that favored me.
Wilkins: Well, enough of me. My guest tonight works copper the way a parson works guilt, slowly, patiently, and into every corner. He hammers the pots, the swan necks, and the doublers at our own foundry here at Fort Wilkins. Please welcome Silas McAllister, known in three townships as Hacksaw.
♦ Chair scrapes on plank floor; heavy boots
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening to everybody listening. And evening to the bear, I suppose, though he does not return the courtesy.
Wilkins: Barnaby returns no courtesies, Silas. He is a Democrat. Now, you have been listening to me run on about planchets and scissel. Do you have anything to say to that, or have I got it all wrong as usual?
Silas: You have got it mostly right, which is your usual. But that scissel, Doctor. My grandfather had a history with scissel. He once bought a whole bale of it off a scrap man who swore it came out of the Philadelphia Mint. Copper strip, punched full of round holes, rolled up like a bolt of calico. Grandfather meant to melt it. But that same week a limb came down through the roof of his cider house, over by the Barnstead line, so he nailed a sheet of scissel over the hole as a stopgap.
Wilkins: A roof made of holes. That is New Hampshire thrift if I ever heard it.
Silas: It leaked like a colander. The rain came straight through every hole a cent ever came out of.
Wilkins: So his cider came out watered before it ever left the barrel, which is the only honest watering ever done in Barnstead.
Silas: That is just what my grandmother said, word for word. But here is the thing. On a clear night with a full moon, that roof threw a hundred little silver circles across the cider-house floor. Perfect round coins of moonlight, all in rows. Word got around, and the young couples of Barnstead took to walking out to see the moon pennies. Grandfather started charging them a cent apiece to stand in the shed.
Wilkins: He charged for moonlight. Silas, your grandfather was a better businessman than the Treasury.
Silas: He was. He took in more cents through that roof than the Mint lost punching it. And he never patched it properly till the day he died.
Wilkins: Now you are a man of punches yourself. Have you ever made a clipped planchet? Ever bit the moon?
Silas: I have, and I am not proud of it. When I was a green apprentice, fourteen years old, my master set me to punching copper rivet blanks out of sheet, to rivet the seams on a pot. You are supposed to walk the sheet along so each punch lands clear of the last hole. I got lazy and walked it short. Every blow, the punch caught the edge of the hole before it, and every rivet came out with a crescent bite taken out of its side. A whole bucket of them.
Wilkins: Exactly how the Mint does it. The punch overlaps the old hole, and the planchet comes out bitten like a cookie.
Silas: My master looked into that bucket a good long while. Then he called them moon-bit rivets. He took one, bored a hole in it, and hung it on my watch chain, and he said, Silas, you wear that until you learn to count. I wore it a year.
Wilkins: And now?
Silas: I still wear it.
♦ Small metal clink, a rivet on a watch chain
Wilkins: There, listeners, a man who carries his own error over his heart. More than the Mint will do. Now Silas, I hear you once caught a crook at the Concord fair.
Silas: I did, two falls ago. There was a fellow in a checked vest with a little table, selling what he called rare mint errors to the city folk. He had one cent with a big straight bite out of one side, and he wanted a dollar for it. A dollar, for a cent.
Wilkins: A ninety-nine-cent sermon on human foolishness.
Silas: I asked to hold it. Now a true clip, the kind the Mint makes when the punch runs off the end of the strip, has a clean edge, and the little rim fades away as it gets near the clip. The upsetting mill never had a full circle to push against, you see. This one had a rim that ran right up to the cut and stopped dead, like a road at a washed-out bridge. And the cut had file marks across it, fine as a comb. He had made it with tin snips and a bastard file the night before.
Wilkins: What did you do?
Silas: I told him I would give him one honest penny for it, and if he did not take it, I would tell the whole fair, starting with the deputy standing behind him eating a pie. He took the penny. That cent is nailed on my shop door to this day, with a sign under it: The Liar's Cent.
Wilkins: Silas, I love you. Now, one more. Off-center. Have you ever seen a real one?
Silas: Just one, and in a strange place. A customer brought me his worm tub to scour, all green and fouled. At the bottom, in the muck, was an Indian cent, the old copper-nickel kind, struck a good third off center. Half the princess was gone. A smooth, blank crescent on the one side, and the wreath on the back shifted the very same way, with a blank crescent of its own.
Wilkins: That is how you know it is the true article. The two faces are shifted in agreement, because both dies struck the coin at the same instant while it sat crooked between them. A man faking it with a hammer cannot make both sides agree.
Silas: That was my judgment. The customer did not want it, said it was a bad penny. So I bored it and gave it to my daughter on a ribbon. She calls it her lopsided luck.
Wilkins: An off-center cent is a coin that showed up at its own christening with its hat on sideways and half its face in the next county. And your girl wears it better than the Mint struck it. Silas, stay right there. We will talk copper after this word.
♪ Banjo and fiddle break, quickening
♪ Brass-band fanfare in miniature, a tin horn and snare
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♪ Fanfare ends on a cymbal tap
♪ Low fiddle drone, segment three
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Silas, you heard that fellow say electrolytic copper. To an old counterstamper that word sounds like poetry. Tell the people why a pure metal matters, and keep it short, because if I let you talk about purity we will be here until Easter.
Silas: I will try, Doctor. A cent and a still have the same enemy, and that is impurity. A planchet with dirt or gas trapped in the metal will peel when it is struck. The trade calls it a lamination, a flake that lifts off the face like old birch bark. A pot hammered from dirty copper does the same thing. It cracks along the bad streak when you work it, or it pits through years later. You cannot hammer honesty into bad metal. It has to be in the melt.
Wilkins: And it has to stay hot and soft while you work it, same as the Mint's strip.
Silas: Yes. Every blow of the hammer hardens copper. You can hear it, the ring of the metal climbs higher and sharper. When it starts to sing like that, you heat it to a dull red and let it cool, and it goes soft as a summer apple again. A man who does not anneal will split his pot at the shoulder, the same as a mint that does not anneal will crack its blanks.
Wilkins: Now let me talk about what copper does inside the still, because there is a link here to every brown penny in your pocket. Why does an old cent go brown, then black? Sulfur. There is sulfur in the air, in coal smoke and rotten eggs and the breath of a Merrimack deputy, and it bites the copper and leaves a dark skin. The collectors call it toning. Now the very same family of chemistry works for us in a still. When your mash ferments, the yeast throws off sulfur stinks, rotten egg and old cabbage, and if that vapor rides into the jar your spirit smells like a privy at a county fair. Copper takes that sulfur onto itself and holds it.
Silas: But only the copper the vapor actually touches, Doctor. People forget that. A copper pot with a tin cap does little good. It is the helmet, the swan neck, and the vapor line, where the hot vapor rubs against the metal, that do the cleaning.
Wilkins: And here is a thing most men never learn. The sulfur problem starts with the yeast. Yeast that is starved, cold, or cooked too hot sulks, and sulking yeast makes more rotten-egg gas. Feed your mash properly and keep it at a decent warmth, and your copper has less dirty work to do. A sulking yeast is like a sulking wife: you will smell it before you hear it.
Wilkins: Now let me give the old method for a plain corn mash, as it is done in these hills, for history's sake. Take cracked corn, eight or ten pounds of it to about five gallons of clean water. Bring it near a boil and keep it there, stirring, till it thickens like porridge, an hour or more, so the starch opens up. Let it cool to about one hundred fifty degrees by a good thermometer. Stir in a pound or two of crushed malted barley, because the malt is what turns that starch to sugar. Hold it warm an hour or so while it goes thin and sweet. Then cool it down to about eighty degrees, about blood-warm to the wrist and a bit under. Only then pitch your yeast, because hot mash kills yeast as surely as a revenue man kills a party. Cover it loose, keep the room aired, and let it work most of a week until the bubbling quits.
Wilkins: Then to the still, under a low and patient fire. And here is where an honest man is made or a dead one. The first spirit off the worm, the foreshots, is poison, and it goes in the dirt, every drop. A few ounces of it on a small run, and more on a big one. After that come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling. They go too, or into a jar set aside for cleaning, never for drinking. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, the part worth the trouble. Then the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog. Those you set aside to run again.
Silas: Collect it in small jars, Doctor. Tell them about the small jars.
Wilkins: Small jars. Many of them, lined up like choirboys and numbered. That way you judge each cut by nose and taste on the tongue, not by guessing at a bucket, and if one jar spills or catches, you lose a jar and not your whole run and your house. And fire, friends: alcohol vapor wants to burn. Never leave a still unwatched while it has heat under it, not for a pipe, not for a privy, not for a pretty neighbor. Keep a bucket of sand or a wet blanket within arm's reach. And seal your joints honestly, which is why I let that pitchman into my house.
Silas: One last thing from the foundry. Never melt coin for still parts. Folks think, a cent is copper, I will melt a sack of them for a patch. The new ones are bronze with tin and zinc in them, and the old ones nickel. You do not know what you are pouring. Buy good, clean, pure sheet.
Wilkins: Hear that? Coin is for spending, stamping, and paying fines. Not for patching stills. Silas, thank you, sir. Go on home before Barnaby smells the lard on your boots.
Silas: Goodnight, Doctor. Goodnight, all. And Barnaby, keep your distance.
♦ Boots on plank floor, door creak, a low bear grunt outside
♪ Banjo transition
♪ Jaunty fiddle, segment four
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail bag. Tonight we have a voice on the call-in line, carried all the way up from North Carolina. Let us crank the machine.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle intensifies, a hollow, distant voice
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Crackle fades
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I salute you and your uncle both, because every family needs one man who puts strange things in kettles, and yours has volunteered. Let me take his medicine apart piece by piece, the way I would take apart a bad molar.
Wilkins: The hickory ash first. You know what ash is good for, Rabbit? Soap. Every farm wife in Merrimack County runs water through a hopper of hardwood ash and gets lye, the potash she boils with tallow to make soap. Hickory ash makes a strong lye. So your uncle is pouring the makings of soap into his doubler. It may knock down a little sourness, it may make the keg foam like a mad dog, and it surely adds nothing you want to drink. What it will not do is clean out bad heads. The heads come off the early part of every run no matter what is sitting in that thumper, and the only cure is the jar you throw away.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Here is a cooper's secret, Rabbit. Red oak leaks. Its grain is full of open pores, long tubes running end to end. A man can put his lips to a stick of red oak and blow bubbles through it into a cup of water. That is why no cooper in his right mind makes a whiskey barrel of red oak. They use white oak, whose pores are plugged up by nature. Shavings in the thump keg will lend some color and a woody taste, so the spirit looks older than it is, which is a trick older than the Republic. But color is not cleanliness. A painted harlot is still a harlot.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings leak like a Concord politician's promises: wet at the start and dry by the end of the term. Tell him Dr. Wilkins says make honest cuts, and keep the ashes for soap and the oak for the woodstove. And Rabbit, thank you for calling. Wilkesboro is a long way from Pittsfield, and you are the finest rabbit ever to come near Barnaby and keep all his legs.
♦ Bear grunts
Wilkins: Now a myth of my own to kill. Every tavern from here to Portsmouth has a man who says, Hold a spoon of your spirit to the candle. If it burns blue, it is safe. If it burns red, it has lead in it, and lead burns red and makes you dead. Pretty little rhyme. A lie from top to bottom. A flame tells you almost nothing. The color shifts with the strength of the spirit, the spoon, and the dirt on it. Lead can hide in a spirit and burn any color it pleases. Methanol, the very poison in your foreshots, burns so pale you can hardly see it in daylight. A man who judges his spirit by the color of the flame is the same man who judges a horse by the color of its dung, and he is generally standing in both. Good metal, no lead solder, honest cuts. That is your safety, not a spoon and a candle.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And now the lesson I promised, the collector's eye. Since the big cents died in '57, this country has caught coin fever. Men who never cared what was in their pockets now sit up nights with a lamp and a glass, and in 1858 a club of them in New York set up as the American Numismatic Society. So you will be shown coins, and you will be told stories. Here is how to tell a Mint mistake from a Wilkins mark. I will strike a coin for each lesson so you remember it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lesson one. My mark goes into a coin. The Mint's mistakes come out of it. When I strike G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., the letters are sunk below the surface, and you can see the metal shouldered up in a little ridge around every letter, like mud around a bootprint. A Mint flaw like a die crack or a broken die shows raised on the coin, a raised line or a raised lump, because the soft metal flowed up into the crack in the steel.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lesson two. Turn it over. When I strike a coin on my anvil, the anvil pushes back, and the back of the coin goes flat and smooth right under my punch, the feathers squashed like a hen that sat on by a fat aunt. The Mint strikes both faces at once between two dies, so a true Mint error shows its trouble on both faces in agreement. An off-center coin is shifted the same way front and back, with a blank crescent on each side. If one side is off and the other is centered, someone has been at it with a hammer, and it was not the Mint.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lesson three, the clip. A true clip has a smooth edge, a curved bite if the punch caught an old hole, a straight one if it ran off the end of the strip, and the rim fades away near it. Often the design is weak right across from the clip. A fake clip has file marks, a sharp corner, and a rim that runs right up and stops dead. Ask Silas about the Liar's Cent on his door.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lesson four, the oddities. A coin that shows its own design sunk backward, like a mirror pressed in wax, is a brockage, made when a struck coin stuck to the die and got pressed into the next blank. A coin with two sets of letters overlapping was struck twice, like a Merrimack deputy kicked twice by a mule: the second blow makes no improvement, but it is twice as interesting to look at. A coin with mushy feathers and a ghost of a date is just a worn die, tired steel that has struck too many. A worn die is like a worn husband: it still does the job, but the details get softer every year, and nobody admires the results.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And lesson five, the last. A coin flaking at the face like birch bark is a lamination, bad metal from the start. Do not pick at it. It will only get worse, like gossip. Now, if the Mint struck every coin centered, honest, and full weight, half the collectors in New York would have to take up a respectable vice. So God bless the Mint's mistakes, and God bless mine.
♪ Banjo transition
♪ Soft brass flourish
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♪ Flourish fades into the parlor banjo theme, low and warm
Wilkins: That is our night, friends. My thanks to Silas Hacksaw McAllister, who wears his first mistake on his watch chain and still swings the best hammer in the Suncook Valley. My thanks to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro and to his uncle, the soap-maker of the thump keg. And my thanks to Barnaby, who has no opinion on numismatics but has eaten three coin purses in his life and passed every coin in them, so he has more circulation experience than the whole Treasury.
Wilkins: If you want to learn this craft the right way, the history, the metal, the mash, and above all the honest cuts that keep a man alive, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a tooth: plain, quick, and with no foolishness. You will learn to read copper, read a fire, and read a run jar by jar, and you will never again put hickory ash in your doubler or trust a blue flame.
Wilkins: Until next time, check your change, weigh your half dimes, keep your fingers clear of the bear, and if you find a penny with my name punched in it, know that it passed through the hands of a gentleman, a scoundrel, and a dentist, all at the same time.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence