Mt. Hood 5 Oz. ATB Sighting At The Philly Mint

neat! I will check it out if I'm ever in the area.

That's really cool; thanks for the info. It's fascinating to hear about (let alone see) the coin making process. I know there have been several interesting shows regarding it on Science Channel / Discovery / etc. And I never tire of watching them.

I can't believe I lived in the Philly area for 10 years and never made it to the mint! Of course that was before I was collecting. Bummer though.

The Grabener wasn't in production, but the wetechnology's vapor blaster was. The struck coins are put in a rotating assembly line collar that moves each coin into position to receive the water vapor treatment. Looks like really high pressure stuff and takes a full minute for each side to receive the blast. The collar holding the coins is what is causing the edge dents and other rim imperfections. After each coin is finish, a worker on the other side of the machine pulls the coin out & inspects and puts in a tray of coins ready for inspection. Next to that is table of unassembled capsules, the black ATB packaging and large shipping boxes. Some of those were already full of packaged coins. Didn't see any of the COAs, perhaps those get added to the packages at the distribution center in Indiana. Really made my day to witness a production coin that I might actually buy and collect.

Saw this assembly line procedure right in the smack middle of the workday, so during the 10 minutes or so that I stood over the area saw only 2 coins receive the treatment, and then the workers pulled out a camp table right next to the equipment and had lunch! The rotating collar only holds about 15 coins at a time and looks to be manually fed the coins, I didn't see this part, if it was one at a time, but I would imagine so. Both sides of the coin receives the treatment at the same time, I meant to say, nevertheless, it still looks like a labor intensive process.

The vapor blaster set up doesn't look that efficient, and I gave up trying to figure out the math because I was sure it was a whole lot faster than what I witnessed if they have to process all 27K per design with that one machine in the three week cycles they have been running with the pucks.

It would have been cool to photograph the area, but as it's a federal facility, no photos allowed. What was neat about the whole thing was being able to easily identify the pucks from 10 feet overhead in the viewing area, and all of the coins in sight had the Mt. Hood reverses up.

The Grabener wasn't in production, had it been, that would have been awesome. I read somewhere it's capable of striking 22 coins per minute, and I would go back to Philly just to see that monster in action. Hope to see a Discovery Channel or NG documentary on this procedure sometime.

Thanks, Mach1! That was great - hope to see more of that kind of thing... perhaps a further YouTube search is in order.

Yea, looked like they clanked pretty good coming out of the press, followed by a nice rim clank when it slid out onto the conveyer belt. I thought it was funny when they were talking about the bullion version of the coin, and held up the numastic version (the mint mark was clearly visible) to demonstrate.

I also seen the part where they were holding a planchet bare-handed. Lets hope they wash those grubby paw-prints off at some point in the process!

I love videos like this. I remember one time I seen a show on how they make the .9999 pure gold Canadian Maple Leaf. I especially liked the part where they show the steps they go through to refine to gold to .9999 pure. They also showed them running the gold bricks through the rolling mill and punching the planchets. From raw gold to finished coin, all work was done in-house. Cool stuff!