Posted 03/21/2016 3:24 pm
I agree that the series would have been improved had the operators of the mint at Durango fulfilled their obligations to buy hubs on a regular basis from France instead of trying to save a few dollars by reworking the old hubs far past their normal working life.
I really wonder if the reason so many high quality counterfeits exist of this type is that the producers of these first hubs went into the sideline of making hubs or dies for counterfeiters as a form of payback to the operators at Durango and as a way to recover their initial costs of making an entire matrix set of die master punches.
Based on comments by Riddell this type of counterfeit was very common in New Orleans and the influx has been attributed to French colonies like Haiti where counterfeit and debased coins were routinely dumped in great numbers.
I really wonder if the reason so many high quality counterfeits exist of this type is that the producers of these first hubs went into the sideline of making hubs or dies for counterfeiters as a form of payback to the operators at Durango and as a way to recover their initial costs of making an entire matrix set of die master punches.
Based on comments by Riddell this type of counterfeit was very common in New Orleans and the influx has been attributed to French colonies like Haiti where counterfeit and debased coins were routinely dumped in great numbers.
