I haven't had much time to work on charts yet, but have been thinking about a few things for the new medals. As far as pricing goes, we were quoted some costs before Daniel Carr raised his prices on last years medals. With the new pricing I think that the cost of each medal will probably go up about 35% (This is just a very general guess, and it could be off either way depending on how much the actual costs are). Here is the link to his custom minting services page:
http://www.moonlightmint.com/services.htm Last time we had quite a few different finishes which helped bring the price down by increasing the total number of medals ordered. This helped quite a bit as far as spreading the design and die prices to more medals. That said, Daniel had a lot of different problems minting the larger medals, and said he is not minting any more of the 63mm size medals. I also think it would be good to drop the Matte finish, since it is mostly a sandblasted finish.
So I have a couple of other ideas that might be cool to have as options that Daniel Carr has done with other medals. We could have some selective gold electro plating on a silver proof as an extra finish. I have seen this on some other club medals that he has done, and it looks really cool. The cost is listed as $5-$25 extra per piece depending on surface area and detail. To me it would be worth it to have a couple. Would anyone else be interested in one like this?
My other thought was having some over strikes made. In the past Daniel Carr has invited some clubs to his mint and and has done some over strikes with the club dies. This would not be feasable for us since our members are all around the world. My thoughts were to keep it large silver coins so our reverse die is not damaged. 90% silver Morgan dollars would be perfect, and I would be willing to pick up some nice ones at local coin shows for our group. My guess is they would cost between $20-$24 each for just the unstruck Morgan, and I could buy some for our members and send them to Daniel Carr all at once so they could be struck and minted with the others. Each one would bear its portion of the design and die cost, and the cost associated with striking it (Mabye another $10 - $15 per medal?). This would also bring down the costs of all the other medals.
Hopefully these things will help simplify the finishes a little. The other thing that took a whole lot of extra time figuring out, was the constant recalculation to get the costs down to the penny. This year I would like to be able to round up the cost a little, and let the leftover money from each medal be donated to the castle treasury. It shouldn't be much for each medal, but it will save me a ton of time and headache, and help to keep the treasury funded. Barry has already said he is ok with collecting the money in the treasury and sending the funds to Daniel Carr this year. All extra funds would stay with the treasury. Please speak any thoughts or problems with this now. Is everyone ok with this?
Thoughts?
