VAMWorld 2.0

San Francisco Mint February 1904. Table of planchets weighed and adjusted (filed or rejected). The first person, Allen, was only average but examined a new silver dollar planchet once every 8.8 seconds -- 528 per hour. The best adjusters completed almost twice as many in the same time.

You can learn more about the work of adjusters in the book From Mine to Mint.

It's a little odd that about half of them only worked on double eagles

DE adjusting was slower than dollars due to the tighter tolerance, and the requirement to separate standard weight, high legal, and low legal so that bags could be assembled within tolerance for the bag. (This applied only to gold coins.)

Gold coin bag tolerance was +/-9 grains per $5,000 in new coins.

Interesting that they had "bean counters" watching workers even back then. I wonder if Soule, Kennedy or Todd were my relatives.

There was a supervisor of adjusters in charge of everyone. The "examiners" reweighed each adjuster's bins of over and under weight pieces to verify consistency and accuracy - these were pieces that were out of tolerance. There were few of these, so anyone who had a lot of them, got extra attention to her work.

"Gatherers" collected the bins of checked pieces and transferred them to larger bins that held, still by weight category, all the that adjuster's work for that day. Thus, during the work day, all the work of every adjuster was segregated from that of the other ladies. Consolidation by weight did not take place until all pieces were accounted for and data was recorded for each adjuster. Planchets and coins were tracked by Troy weight -- not pieces or dollar value. Any loss or gain in weight was recorded, and underweight pieces were returned to the Coiner who added them to his bullion account. The struck pieces only became coins (money) when the Coiner delivered them AND the Cashier accepted them as legal tender. The ladies worked from 8am to 3 or 4pm; there was also some overtime work on occasion.