Excellent. Thanks Andrew. Well worth the 18 minutes to watch (and I think 9 for the second video).
Has anyone been to the Melle centre?? Looks well worth a trip.
They don't say for certain what
weight of AE coin they are striking - as the
Ptolemaic double
eagle was found in several
weight standards - but we are led to believe that it is the 8 gram
denomination they talk about earlier. It is successfully struck cold using a 5kg sledge. I would love for them to experiment someday striking the earlier heavier
Ptolemaic bronzes (up to 100 grams!) one day using the mouton / pile driver device described in "B. Bouyon, G.
Depeyrot - J.L. Desnier, Systèmes et technologie
des monnaies de bronze, (4e s. avant J.-C. - 3e s. après J.-C.), Wetteren, 2000."
The cleaning set-up from the Alexandrian workshop is interesting. I will try to duplicate it some time with my small digital microscope and lap top. However, I think the digital microscope that I have (worth about $100) has such a narrow depth of
field as to render this impossible.
I am not sure though what she was doing using the rotary tool with what looked like a felt burnishing wheel. I have used this to gently polish
ren wax on coins but I don't know how it could possible clean a coin. It is too soft. Interestingly the coin she was working on appeared to have
had the
patina burnished off in parts as it was showing rather coppery highlights. I wonder if she
had put some form of abrasive paste on the coin first - then a felt wheel might do some cleaning though it would likely grind away the
patina too.
Shawn