this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
155 points (99.4% liked)

Historical Artifacts

1327 readers
106 users here now

Just a community for everyone to share artifacts, reconstructions, or replicas for the historically-inclined to admire!

Generally, an artifact should be 100+ years old, but this is a flexible requirement if you find something rare and suitably linked to an era of history, not a strict rule. Anything over 100 is fair game regardless of rarity.

Generally speaking, ruins should go to !historyruins@lemmy.world

Illustrations of the past should go to !historyillustrations@lemmy.world

Photos of the past should go to !HistoryPorn@lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You could just re-melt the sprue and use it to make the next batch, right?

What puzzles me is the lack of vent holes to allow displaced air out of the mold once it's assembled. (Unless they're on the other half, the one that's not pictured here. That seems doubtful.) So whatever this was meant to cast must have been a very runny metal with a low melting point, probably with the mold itself being piping hot as part of the process as well. Probably not much of an alloy, and probably very easy to melt again.

The inscriptions on these appear to be awfully similar to some of those listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_dynasty_coinage

Wikipedia mentions these specifically as being cast, and in big batches with multiple molds filled in one operation. In light of that I'm surprised that the mold is so small. Check out this sumbitch, for instance, which makes 42 coins in one go. That seems a little more like it, if you're going to go through all that effort.

I'm reading that apparently what with one thing and another, the Chinese were still producing cast rather than struck coinage all the way up to the very early 1900s. Their currencies changed a lot throughout their long and never-ending parade of civil wars, overthrows, usurpations, fractures, and reunifications, and it seemed every time their leadership changed it came along with a reinvention of all the coinage as well.

[โ€“] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I assumed the best holds are on the matching mold for the other side. It's not the metal that's being wasted. As you point out it can be remelted. But heat isn't free. That's wood or coal that's going up in smoke.