Modern Nickel Counterstamps, No More Lies

never seen one

Thanks for posting - that's pretty cool. I really like all the counterstamped coins I've seen posted in these forums but have yet to run across one myself. That would be a fun collection to start.

Wild.

It must be illegal.
If this is not illegal then companies could advertise the same way?

Shop Smart Shop S Mart.

It probably is, but really how is it going to be enforced. Barring a huge operation or getting very lucky its impossible to know who did it.

It looks like doubling on "No More War"...

I know for a fact that there are at least five rolls worth floating around Oklahoma City. The dies were cut with a Gorton P1-3 pantomill, they're not doubled. The dies have been mounted in three different presses over the last six years... two different small manual screw presses and more recently a scissor-action kick press. The latter seems to work best as it's very easy to hit too hard with the screw presses and distort the coin, whereas the scissor-action press can be adjusted with a stop to precisely calibrate the force of the blow. With practice it's possible to get up to a rate of about 15 coins per minute. It's a very athletic process, akin to riding a stationary bicycle with significant resistance. General advice is to switch legs either every shot or after some number. It's difficult to do it more than an hour or two at a time, mostly because of the eye-strain of having to flip and turn each coin to the right orientation. Having a second person to feed oriented coins to the pressman would smooth things considerably. By coining standards it's a light touch... somewhere between one and two tons... so a small pneumatic marking press could be set up with these and that would eliminate the back-breaking athletic aspect.

The offer of "unlimited" numbers to a political candidate who would adopt the slogan was based on the idea that in such a situation the dies and presses could easily be proliferated and the operation would proceed by volunteers as an aspect of the camapign. I have no doubt that volunteers would be available for such an effort if it ever came to pass. For now it is simply a small-business opportunity for someone to crunch nickels for an hour or two a day and make a few extra bucks selling them to enthusiasts of whatever theme is being portrayed.

The key to designing such a thing is to be brutally concise Say what you need to say in as few characters as possible. NO MORE LIES: ten characters that speaks volumes. END THE FED: nine characters.

Short story: I was doing field work outside of a very small hamlet in rural Nevada... so small that there was only one business of any kind, a sort of motel/convenience store/casino. I was staying there for a week or so. Several times a day I'd go down to the convenience store and get a cup of coffee. With tax it was $1.05 so I would lay down a dollar and a nickel. I had a roll of NO MORE LIES nickels with me and was using those. For several days nobody noticed. Then one clerk saw that something was different, commented on the slogan, and eyeballed it closely. I feigned ignorance. They were on the point of thinking it was something unusual when they opened the cash drawer and looked in, saying: "Oh, there's a whole bunch of 'em. That must just be the new one". The point of the story being that most people are so inundated by the plethora of quarter and nickel and penny designs now that they scarcely blink an eye anymore.

Reverse side of the dollar coin NO WAR FOR OIL project