Tokens
Gorby's Little Mint
Well, here it is, one week into the New World of Gorby's Little Mint.
At the moment, although I have a number of projects in the Mint, such as chess sets, backgammon sets and senet sets, I'm concentrating on fulfilling orders for my new Atlantean Contact Coin series.
What I do to make these tokens is:
I buy at about 30% above market a sheet of rolled-out .30 gauge pure 24k .9999 fine gold from a local refinery. If gold is at 1500 I pay around 2000 for the fabricated metal. Wire is even more of a charge for fabrication.
Now I cut the .30 gauge sheet into strips about as wide as I expect I'll need for the run.
Then I feed the sheets, with help from Claude, into what is called a "rolling mill", which squeezes the metal between two spring-loaded calibrated steel rollers, slowly, slowly, to the gauge you want to target, such as .48 or .50.
Okay, now I use a punch to get my disks at the exact right size for each denomination down to 1/2 stater. Below that, it's all hand-cutting, right down to those match-head sized punks called the 1/64th and 1/32nd stater, which are in fact, barely visible, yet all tokens are fashioned by hand...my hand.
So at this point, I have a blank disk of pure, solid gold. It's like butter and, yes, this is the stuff of which legendary gold was made. It's the gold of ancient coinage, and nothing else looks and feels exactly like the real thing.
There's something magical about actually having pure, raw solid gold in your hands. Believe it or not -- and you will, the moment you experience it for yourself -- there's a "vibe" to pure, raw solid gold.
No other gold item has the same power as pure, raw solid gold. There is a mystical power that is drawn to and from the metal when it is in its purest form in a solid state.
A gold coin is attractive to everyone; ask them why, they'll tell you it's more valuable, is worth more. But that's not the actual attraction. Without the value added into the equation, there is still the draw, the attraction, of pure solid raw gold. It is not a physical thing, nor is it a money-thing. It's the power of gold itself.