Real Broadstruck Coinss?

The ones I posted are not and are now very destroyed. I was just seeing if they could be created. It took me 15 minutes to make a punch, had I taken any real time I think I could make solid home made ones and was just letting everyone know BUYER BEWARE.

Am I missing something? I see no similarity at all between the coins twohawks made and the ones from the original post.

The key difference between the bogus "errors" made by twohawks' method and a genuine broadstrike would be the relative thickness of the two areas of the coin. On a genuine broadstrike, the central struck area is much thinner than on a normal coin, and usually thinner than the "broad rim" because the material normally contained within the collar die has squirted out the sides.

On twohawk's "press job", the extra rim width has been produced by flattening and thinning the material of the rim, while the central portion is still at full coin thickness.

Perhaps this picture will demonstrate:



Further, the press jobs will always (presumably) be exactly centred; a broadstrike often is off-centre and oddly shaped, because there's no collar holding it in place. Finally, there will be no trace whatsoever of the reeded edge on a broadstruck dime; I can clearly see some reeding on some of twohawk's dimes.

My broadstruck Virginia quarter shows all these features:





These pointers may not help you purchasing such an error off ebay (I can't really tell what the rims are like from the pics those seller has), but should help you tell bogus from fair dinkum once you get it in hand.

Broadstrikes are indeed very similar, except that ancient and mediaeval coin dies usually took the lack of a collar into account, and had extra width built into them to compensate for a slightly off-centre strike. Modern machine dies don't need this.

The dies in a modern coin press don't have a set distance apart where they stop at; indeed, if there's no blank coin at all in between them when they strike together, they'll actually smash into each other, creating the "clashed dies" error on subsequent coins that are struck by them.

Rather, the change in thickness is all about high applied pressure over a short space of time. A broadstruck coin puts up less resistance to the dies coming together, because the metal that should have been there stopping the dies coming together has squeezed out the sides rather than being compressed. So the dies travel further through the metal (and come closer together) than they would for a normal, collar-restrained coin. Theoretically, if the high pressure kept being applied, a broadstruck coin would eventually become paper thin in places as the dies smash into each other, with almost all the metal between the two dies squeezed out - but a modern high-speed coin press applies full pressure only for a brief instant before they pull up again ready to strike the next coin.

I often wondered how die clashes occurred when the dies are set at a defined stroke so they don't hit each other. At first I thought it was just an occurance of the setup process. But considering how common slight die clashes are it sounds to me like the presses can fall out of adjustment rather easily.

This was a very good read--I appreciate the expertise.