Making Imitation Capital Plastic Holders Or Ideas?

Amazing!

This looks great. I am constantly amazed at how other people can come up with such great soultions to their problems.

As I was reading through this thread I was wondering if a 3-D printer would work or am I up in the night?

This is a simply stunning display. Nice job! Would you mind sharing your techniques such as plastic thicknesses, is the layer holding the coin sandwiched between sheets of similar thickeness? Did you tap the screw holes or use nuts on the back, and are your labels from a label maker and positioned onto the plastic?

@BuckeyeCoinGuy Thanks for the tip on the backwards drilling. The problem is trying to find a perfect sized drill bit for something as large as a half dollar. I have to use an adjustable bit and will try to reverse it, but the cutting edges (two of them) appear to be just small knife blades instead of slanted, sharpened edges.

The sandwich includes the outer 2 acrylic sheets, the center foam sheet, and "posters" for the obverse and reverse. A side view is shown below.

The acrylic sheets are 18" x 24". Since they are relatively large, I wanted to make sure the assembly didn't bow, so I chose the back sheet to be 0.25" thick. The front sheet is 0.09" thick.

The foam is volara, which is the same material that is used for foam rings in capsules. Rolls of this foam can be purchased in different colors. This is 1/8" thick white.

The posters were printed out on a campus plotter and show the date, variety, and die pairing that I could identify. The posters also show black and whites of the coins I don't plan on adding to this collection lol.

The best way to drill the holes for me was to progress up in drill bit size from 1/16" to the tapped hole size, and then for the top, the through hole size. I used a drill press and lubricated the bit often with soapy water. I taped the plastic itself with masking tape on both sizes prior to drilling to reduce surface tractions. The back sheet was then tapped for 8-32 screws.

I used an x-acto blade compass cutter to cut out the circles on both sheets of paper and through the foam. The coins fit in the foam circles snugly.

All and all, it took a long time to make but was an enjoyable and rewarding process.

That looks really nice. Job well done.

Excellent job

The poster over the foam is probably the neatest part to me. Solves the hole size issue and looks better than raw foam or even the colored plastic that Capital uses.

I think you could sell enough of them through this forum to pay for a coin or two to fill some of those holes.

This is an improvement over Capital Plastics holders with some light tweaking.

If you made both top and bottom clear sheets thicker you could probably minimize some of the tooling for all the fasteners. Probably cheaper that way in the end when labor isn't free.

You would also only need to stock the one part thickness for top / bottom sheet then too.

Last concern I would see would be the paper and ink for the poster. You wouldn't want any interactions between them and the coins over time.

I think my posters (if I use them) will not be paper. I don't like anything with a potential for holding water with my coins. This is why I hope to make all plastic holders/album pages (now with foam middle layer though!).