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 Replies: 12 / Views: 9,368 |
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Valued Member
United States
425 Posts |
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Valued Member
United States
397 Posts |
Aviation snips or bolt cutters. Either would work, although the snips would be a tad difficult.
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
14454 Posts |
yep I have seen them cut with bolt cutters before but most of those were fake but still would cut a coin of any kind the same
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3592 Posts |
A metal shear would work too...silver is not hard to cut.
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
17884 Posts |
I think the metal shear is more likely.
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Valued Member
 United States
425 Posts |
Not sure if it can be seen very well in the 3rd picture, but the major cut comes from the reverse side of the coin. There is still a minor cutting edge that can be seen from the obverse side. So I am not sure a metal shear or a bolt cutter style tool was used.
Also wondering....... who did this work? A bank, a silver smith, who?
Does anybody else have coins that were cut like this? As I said before, my interest in Coins is mostly historical. So just how common were these cut coins?
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
12437 Posts |
8 Reale coins were the original "pieces of eight". 1 Reale equaled 12.5 cents or a "bit" so "two bits" would be the equivalent of a quarter. Small change was sometimes hard to come by in the early 19th century so 8 Reales were sometimes cut into wedges to make change with each wedge being a bit. Remember that the face value of a coin was dependent on silver content which made the actual silver content more important than any face value representation. It makes sense to me that this practice was sometimes carried over to US coinage as well, it looks like someone needed 25 cents change there  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3592 Posts |
oden, it is hard to tell the difference between a minor cutting edge or if it were just filed after cutting.
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Valued Member
United States
425 Posts |
Maineman, As a youth I worked at a steel works that made bridges. I worked in the shear shop and grinded alot of edges! I do not have a micro-scope, but with a very strong magnafing glass I can see the edge of this coin looks just like the 1" plate steel that was cut by the large hydrolic shear. More like the metal has been torn or ripped than cut clean. I can also see from the edge of this cut/coin that there were two blades that cut it......OR.....some one came back with a file and cleaned off the sharp edge. But to me it really does look like it was cut with two opposing blades. One side cutting more of the coin, the other side mostly just holding the coin as it was cut.
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Moderator
 Australia
16837 Posts |
Cutting would have been done by whatever method happened to be handy. In a pinch, a hammer and cold chisel would have been messy, but adequate for the job. In mediaeval times, it was much simpler. Coins were generally much thinner then, you could cut them with ordinary scissors, or simply fold them a couple of times in your fingers and they'd snap clean in half. Quote:
Also wondering....... who did this work? A bank, a silver smith, who? Some isolated colonial governments (such as on islands in the Caribbean) produced "official" cut coins with their own counterstamps, but for the most part, coins were cut privately, by whoever needed to make change. An employer paying their workers, a pirate divvying up his loot among his crew, even a merchant running a store and wanting to give actual change, rather than an IOU. But as a general rule, it wasn't the banks that did it - they tended to hate the practice, since the cut pieces that were eventually deposited with them were rarely precise fractions, often falling short in weight which the banks would have to cover the shortfall of. Which leads to the next issue... Quote:
...OR...some one came back with a file and cleaned off the sharp edge... Entirely possible. Back when coins were traded at bullion value, clipping was a common (though illegal) practice - that's where a coin's edge would be trimmed away and then the coin would be put back in circulation, leaving the clipper with a little pile of silver shavings. Do that often enough and you'd make a tidy profit, for free. Reeded and other security edges were invented to combat this practice, but a cut coin was particularly prone to clipping -you could clip it, and nobody could tell. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Valued Member
United States
455 Posts |
How interesting and informative!
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4846 Posts |
i was MDing and found a State Quarter with the same kind of cutting. |
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Valued Member
United States
309 Posts |
There is a great answer to this I came across in the "Making of America" website. Hosted at two sites, both at Cornell University and also the University of Michigan, old books and periodicals are avaliable for key word search. Somewhere on one of the two sites is a periodical story written, circa 1890, entitled "Coins of our Fathers" showing half dollars paid to Native Americans with how and why they were cut back in the 1850s. Your "frontier quarter" fits the bill. Good luck in your research.
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Replies: 12 / Views: 9,368 |
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Posted 11/12/2010 01:20 am
