Press position of silver dollars dies - New Orleans Mint suggestion

[RogerB]

This letter is in response to a suggestion from the New Orleans Mint to reverse the position of dollar dies in their toggle presses. By inference, it shows that in 1900 the obverse die was in the upper position.

[Longstrider]

@RogerB , Please keep these coming. I can't get enough of these old, historic correspondences. It's nice to know that government, even then, felt the need to correct non existent problems. Thanks..John

[colwillys]

A Super WOW , great read .. Please keep the Knowledge coming .
Thank you for taking the time for these mint letters .

[RogerB]

Context: The NO Mint had been struggling with cracking dollar dies for several years. They usually blamed the Engraving Department. The real cause was poor planchet annealing due to attempting to process more planchets than the annealing furnace could handle. That, in turn, was because Mint HQ was demanding more silver dollars per month than the NO equipment could handle. Had HQ/Treasury backed off the NO quota, the "die problem" would have vanished.

More on this later after the balance of 1900 correspondence is digitized.

[HawkeEye]

This is interesting as always and the method of problem solving is also interesting. Today we would probably have the planchets prepared in a central location to control quality and ship press ready planchets to the mint to solve something like this. But times were different and so was problem solving, thus VAMs.

[vamsterdam]

we should have had Charles barber in charge of the daylight savings issue! thanks for sharing the great numismatic history with us.

[RogerRock]

Dedicated numismatists are hungry for this dynamic mint interaction history ! My "how and why" responses
to the only OMM 1906 D/O Barber Dime Discovery Piece always seem inadequate. Please continue to offer
your mint history facts and interpretations!!

[vampicker]

Very enlightening letter. Thanks for posting it.

[RogerB]

RogerRock - This is part of the reason for a From Mine to Mint-2 is in the works.

The US Mints have never collected or maintained the kinds of detailed information on operations and equipment that modern collectors can use to understand and explain the appearance of coins. Even today, they do not keep information - the ordinary day-to-day operations and machinery data....

Items being posted are only a very tiny part of the unexplored data sitting in archive boxes and rotting leather bound volumes. NNP will maintain the data once retrieved - but they are not in the business of recognizing, correlating and interpreting.