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I Had To Take A Few Bullets For What I Got


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As usual, a great hunt and even better report.  I like the the 1/2 Real (no surprise there 😁).

I don't quite understand why a large cent would be used as a backdrop for cutting coins.  Why not an anvil, for example?  The implication is that they used a knife to cut the coins?  As opposed to a shear....  Admittedly I have no idea how they did things back then, and likely there wasn't a single method but rather 'whatever works'.  The speculation/research/identification is almost as fun as the finding.

Coincidentaly I'm having dinner tonight at the house of a friend of my wife's.  Her husband is a blacksmith and I'll get a tour of his shop.  He's not an historian but he might be able to show me some tools they *could* have used for cutting coins.  Worth an ask.

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Very nice finds there 350! Coming from the perspective of a longtime relic and artifact hunter as well as a collector I feel that the partial copper is definitely the star of the show.I would also have to concur that your deduction about its purpose is spot on.There is probably not a whole lot of us out here including myself that would have come to that conclusion so quickly so good call.

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2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

As usual, a great hunt and even better report.  I like the the 1/2 Real (no surprise there 😁).

I don't quite understand why a large cent would be used as a backdrop for cutting coins.  Why not an anvil, for example?  The implication is that they used a knife to cut the coins?  As opposed to a shear....  Admittedly I have no idea how they did things back then, and likely there wasn't a single method but rather 'whatever works'.  The speculation/research/identification is almost as fun as the finding.

Coincidentaly I'm having dinner tonight at the house of a friend of my wife's.  Her husband is a blacksmith and I'll get a tour of his shop.  He's not an historian but he might be able to show me some tools they *could* have used for cutting coins.  Worth an ask.

Thanks GB. I read a long time ago somewhere that they usually used a knife or chisel and some sort of hammering device (not many rocks here so possibly a tool) to cut coins. Reeding coins was a result of unscrupulous activity, shaving bits off and/or cutting them inaccurately. 😀 An iron or steel anvil is a possibility of course, but you could throw a coin on a log, and probably not bend the coin. 😁

Copper being a softer metal probably took it easy on the cutting tool. The varied lengths of the cuts imply a knife blade over a chisel.

I admit it is speculation, but I think a pretty good guess. 😀

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3 hours ago, Doc Bach said:

Very nice finds there 350! Coming from the perspective of a longtime relic and artifact hunter as well as a collector I feel that the partial copper is definitely the star of the show.I would also have to concur that your deduction about its purpose is spot on.There is probably not a whole lot of us out here including myself that would have come to that conclusion so quickly so good call.

Thanks Doc! 🙂

The first coins I ever found in this area (about 200 feet from my front doorstep) were cut Spanish Pistareens. The next coin was an 1805 half cent not too far from that. I also picked at least 3 half Reales from that field. It's a field above a landing where all sorts of commerce occurred, but no historical record of it exists, just some names. Researching cut silver is what led me to this conclusion, I could be wrong of course.

This field traded through many hands, I got all my intel on it from the farmer whose family has owned it since the 1940s. They told me of a steamboat captain who lived and was buried there, horse racing, and I worked with a descendant of one of the owners before the farmer who also had a farm here. It's a river peninsula surrounded by water with deep ravines all around, but at least 200+ acres of farm. I'd like to investigate more but the farmer appreciates my discretion, as do many of the other people that have given me permission to search their property. The other issue is that a large portion of recorded history for this county was lost many years ago to fire.

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48 minutes ago, Lodge Scent said:

F350, you get an award for finding two of the gnarliest but very cool coins that I have seen posted in some time. 😉

Thanks much LC. The half Reale is kind of typical for the area, a couple of which I've found with tooth marks in them, possibly animal but reportedly human 😀 The Merc took a beating from fertilizer.

It's a shame they destroyed a "Lodge Scent" to cut whatever it was they were cutting. 🤣 Can't help it that name is clever. 🙂

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6 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Coincidentaly I'm having dinner tonight at the house of a friend of my wife's.  Her husband is a blacksmith and I'll get a tour of his shop.  He's not an historian but he might be able to show me some tools they *could* have used for cutting coins.

Here's a tool he said could be used:

blacksmith_cutoff-tool.jpg.49d67c89aec1615fe15c28779fb96b25.jpg

It fits into an anvil.  Then the coin would be held in place by a plyers type device and subsequently hit with a hammer.  This is similar to just using a chisel.  Likely a sturdy piece of wood is preferable as an intermediary instead of strking the coin directly with a hammer, the latter of which could obliterate the coin's details.

But maybe anything available (such as a sharp knife for cutting, as if you were slicing bread -- your understanding) would work.  I doubt there was a cut coin inspector who reviewed the work and authorized it.  :laugh:  The coin books I looked through implied this procedure was something done in the British Colonies and eventually the early years of the USA itself, not a practice performed in the Spanish possessions or homeland.  So we USA coin collectors have no one to blame but our barbaric ancestors and 'founding fathers' for butchering these otherwise pieces of art... 🤔

 

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1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

But maybe anything available (such as a sharp knife for cutting, as if you were slicing bread -- your understanding) would work.  I doubt there was a cut coin inspector who reviewed the work and authorized it.  :laugh:  The coin books I looked through implied this procedure was something done in the British Colonies and eventually the early years of the USA itself, not a practice performed in the Spanish possessions or homeland.  So we USA coin collectors have no one to blame but our barbaric ancestors and 'founding fathers' for butchering these otherwise pieces of art... 🤔

 

Thanks GB. 🙂

I've been looking for methods of cutting coins in colonial times, haven't found much other than mentions of "sturdy shears" or "chisel" as a regular method of coin cutting. It was most interesting to find that the "tobacco" colonies were mostly cutting coins.

I did happen to stumble upon a massive account of colonial coins that may interest you:

http://numismatics.org/digitallibrary/ark:/53695/nnan48359

It's huge, it describes all of the currencies used in colonial times.

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1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

The coin books I looked through implied this procedure was something done in the British Colonies and eventually the early years of the USA itself

Here's a quick screenshot from this article done in 2001 regarding coin cutting:Screenshot_20230313_222357_Brave.thumb.jpg.b4269abf28f2c461d660fa1ce193fcc9.jpg

And here is the link to that PDF again, we discussed this a long time ago. 😀

https://www.academia.edu/31971759/THE_COLONIAL_NEWSLETTER_When_Cross_Pistareens_Cut_Their_Way_Through_the_Tobacco_Colonies

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