Are you lurking here? Here is a reply to that Email you sent me. It came back 2 x, so here it is.......
Hi Dick....The only clad coins that I have worked on are copper pennies and US quarters. Canadian quarters have recently been made of nickel and currently of steel. Both metals are too hard to work with. Now if you are going to work on foreign coins, well that really opens up a lot of possibilities. France has some beautiful coins made of bronze which really come out sharp. Great Britain's older pennies and silver coins (cost very little) also make some nice looking coins. As a rule, I only make a coinring out of a coin where the date will remain intact, along with any other information which might be of interest.
Every coin store that I have shopped in has a bin of foreign coins, usually 6 for a dollar. Out of that, you can pick and choose a good variety of usable coins. I bought a used "WORLD COINS BOOK" 1901 - 2002 a few years ago for $10.00 and it pretty well gives me the metallic content of all the coins minted around the world.
Ring size is tricky.The bigger the coin, the bigger the ring. You can make a ring larger by forcing it down the ringmandril further, but that has it's limitations, as it will eventually break. So, after you have made rings from different size coins, keep a log of their sizes, then you can roughly predict the size of your ring. And silver US Mercs dimes make nice baby rings, while still retaining the date.
Hope this helps Dick. Good Luck With Those Coinrings!
John Bortscher (Edmonton)
Hi Dick....The only clad coins that I have worked on are copper pennies and US quarters. Canadian quarters have recently been made of nickel and currently of steel. Both metals are too hard to work with. Now if you are going to work on foreign coins, well that really opens up a lot of possibilities. France has some beautiful coins made of bronze which really come out sharp. Great Britain's older pennies and silver coins (cost very little) also make some nice looking coins. As a rule, I only make a coinring out of a coin where the date will remain intact, along with any other information which might be of interest.
Every coin store that I have shopped in has a bin of foreign coins, usually 6 for a dollar. Out of that, you can pick and choose a good variety of usable coins. I bought a used "WORLD COINS BOOK" 1901 - 2002 a few years ago for $10.00 and it pretty well gives me the metallic content of all the coins minted around the world.
Ring size is tricky.The bigger the coin, the bigger the ring. You can make a ring larger by forcing it down the ringmandril further, but that has it's limitations, as it will eventually break. So, after you have made rings from different size coins, keep a log of their sizes, then you can roughly predict the size of your ring. And silver US Mercs dimes make nice baby rings, while still retaining the date.
Hope this helps Dick. Good Luck With Those Coinrings!
John Bortscher (Edmonton)