Time to make a poll: ' Foundation to buy gold coins for all crunchers' =)
On a more serious note, we can do coins in plastics for free in low/medium volume. Beyond that, it would cost a little to buy the print cartridges. Labour will be us, so free.
With respect to metals, we can do small volume at incredibly high resolution on the CnC mill, also free, in any 'normal' metal softer than tool-steel. We can also print the coin in titanium, but that would be very costly. Once we have an indication of preferred size I can go price that up as a matter of interest.
We can also do the coins in wood, but the height differential would be replaced with laser etching. Essentially, the 'coins' would be flat discs of wood with the images burnt on. The build table for the laser is massive, and could do 100s of coins in one go. We would have to test resolution of finer details.
We will go make a plastic version of this coin on the machines available to demonstrate the build quality early next week.
Surely, if any metal were used it would have to be silicon, no?
Dies of laughter
Great idea! We can actually do sandstone, which is silica and some bound oxygen. Close enough?
Yeah I was joking but after a quick search you can buy wafers http://www.ebay.com/bhp/silicon-wafer
Probably need to go on a substrate tho...
It's sounding like the mill is the best idea for the couple of commemorative metal coins the team are looking to give away. I'm partial to brass as it's weighty and golden - are steel, copper and brass the three options available?
Wooden could be interesting and efficient, but in terms of novelty and longevity I'm not sure - plastics might be best in this case, given the high resolution you can achieve on your machine. Titanium sounds like it'd be prohibitively costly however - perhaps milled and printed are the best options?
Pretty much. The thing is that, for example, 'steel' is actually a massive family of alloys with widely varying appearances and properties. Once people decide what they want to see we can prototype some.
Correct on the wood - it would have the shortest life, especially as the detail is only burnt onto the surface. Plastics are cheap, but not as 'nice' as metal I suppose...
I agree on Titanium being over the top - it would be a good option if the plan was to give away only one coin or something.
Ahh, got'cha - I won't pretend to have knowledge on alloys, so shall leave that to the experts. I'd certainly like to see it in brass or copper - I know they're the most popular choices so far.
Plastics are cheap, but I expect as a novelty / marketing item it'd still be fun. If we're looking at a mass produced souvenir coin in the future I'm sure there's plenty of companies out there that can do this for us at a reasonable cost (less than £2 a coin from what I've seen.)
I know there was talk about auctioning a single, very special coin perhaps made out of titanium.. But it's sounding like it'd be too prohibitively expensive without a donation from the foundation to fund it.