Flat disk with check pattern

[Country Dirt Kid]

Flat disk with check pattern (Updated pics)



I found this thing in a farm field in a place that had plenty of square nails. All the nails have mismatched heads so I think this place is old. I see on the map that there was a farm there in 1872. In 1880’s the building disappeared off of the property. It looks like copper but I can barely make out shiny silvery color like it was chrome plated or something like that. The backside has a hole where you can see that the item is actually made up of two layers. It appears,to have been flattened.
Any ideas thanks

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Cry Of The Eagle: History And Legends Of The Cherokee Indians And Their Buried Treasure - Grab it through Amazon!

[Retired Sarge]

The waffle pattern side reminds me of where something was attached. Some nails have waffle patterns on the head either due to a waffle pattern on the hammer or due to the nail being made that way.

So maybe a patch placed over a nail..........

Or who knows what else, just a good wild arse guess.......

 

[ANTIQUARIAN]

No idea... but it's interesting.
Welcome to Tnet from Toronto!

Dave

 

[DCMatt]

 

[Hawks88]

Interesting find. No idea. Welcome to tnet from Niagara Falls

 

[DCMatt]

View attachment 1662360

Sorry. I guess my post was a little too cryptic.

I'm thinking it's the remains of a Victorian era picture hanger nail.

 

[Yak1366]

Cool find, Congrats!!!

 

[Reanm8er]

Welcome CDK, cool find!

Since Matt pointed out the likely imprint of a modern nail's head perhaps someone used it as spark proof insulator between the nail and hammer in a flammable or explosive environment? Maybe that why the house ain't there no more! LOL

 

[Country Dirt Kid]

Thanks for the help guys. A picture frame decorative nail fits the shape the best but every example those that I could find was way to ornate. I thought is was a button or rosette that was smashed flat with the shank ripped off but I cant find that waffle pattern on any button. If you look closely at the waffle pattern you can see the irregular outline of some kind of punch or stamping tool . like this maybe But I'm just grasping at straws

 

[Retired Sarge]

Thanks for the help guys. A picture frame decorative nail fits the shape the best but every example those that I could find was way to ornate. I thought is was a button or rosette that was smashed flat with the shank ripped off but I cant find that waffle pattern on any button. If you look closely at the waffle pattern you can see the irregular outline of some kind of punch or stamping tool . like this maybeView attachment 1662529 But I'm just grasping at straws

Grasping at straws is how some of these mysteries get solved.....

 

[Reanm8er]

Good clue Kid!

Those are silver smith's decorative punches. Someone might have been practicing on copper! In looking at this more closely this appears to be a transfer copy of something. The copper slug was laid over a harder, flat, object with the distinctive image and hammered down on it to form the image on the slug. That secondary imprint is the outline of the periphery of the die.

May I venture to ask where in general terns did you find this. Also. could you please weigh it and compare it to the weight of a colonial coin?

In the very early days, of colonial America, the only legal tender was English script. This was done to insure that if their script fell into the wrong hands it could just be declared valueless. The colonists, being used to hard currency didn't like this so they sought other monetary values for their commerce. That's why we find Spanish eight real pieces and cobs cut off of them where they made change.

What you have here could be one settlement's local answer to the problem. In theory, an ounce of copper is still worth an ounce of copper no matter what's stamped on it. The seal and value stamped on it was your insurance that the weight was verified by some government. But consider that if a local smith took a piece of copper that was noticeably heavier than the British coin and stamped over a homemade die, it should be of equal worth.

Consider the token system adapted by the American small business men during the Great Depression. The reason was the same. There was no script in circulation. My grandparents described it as "a dollar was a dollar but nobody had a dollar!" The country stores had either stamped tokens or printed ones on wood that bore the name of their business and the trade value. There were set values for the agricultural and homemade products brought in for trade and the appropriate tokens were issued. You could then use the tokens to purchase things you couldn't grow like sugar, tobacco or coffee. It might be possible to ID the source and approximate age with a metallurgical exam.

Best wishes and great Holidays!

 

[DCMatt]

Some excellent points have been made. I will concede that it is not a picture hanger nail.

But I still don't think it's a token or coin of any kind (until Bramblefind posts and makes me look foolish... again ).

 

[DCMatt]

BTW... We are the Royal Court of Grasping in the What is it? forum on Treasurenet.

 

[Country Dirt Kid]

thank you I appreciate all of your efforts. If you look closely you can see gold. Even the back part where the piece fell out there is still gold.
I cleaned the thing in hydrochloric acid and took some pic with a microscope camera and it it turns out to be made of copper and gold plated. This is the 4th time I detected some junk that turned out to be gold plated. I found this at a farm that had a building on it in 1872 but the building was gone on the 1883 map. After that there was never again a building on it. Its just a soybean field now. The item weighs 4.3 grams and is about 3 cm in diameter. The earliest it could possibly be is 1840, that's when the settlers first came to this area.

 

[Reanm8er]

As Matt so kindly said and I for one am proud to be considered the jester or even the village idiot of this panel!

As for the gold aspect. The die could have been used to stamp a design into a small gold disc, thereby leaving a golden residue on the "pressure plate". The fracturing on the Pressure plate reveals that it was beaten stoutly, perhaps until the gold was of a uniform thickness. Take it out trim it till the weight was right and spend it! Virginia was the largest source of gold for many years after the English colonies were formed. It was glacial gold and could be traced all the way back to the Bering sea in later years, with deposits in Ohio and other states as well. There are still places in Va where you can placer mine, and find color. If a certain man had a producing vein on his property and had had an assay proving it's content, he could set up a smelting operation and stamp his own tokens just so he could ID the slug as his. It would un-complicate life a great deal as far the commerce aspect. And, of course, few if any of these slugs exist because they went back to England to make fancies for the crown and secure they're economy.

Point 2. Most folks know that you can't fuse aluminum to steel. Or can you?

Under the right circumstances, two dissimilar metals can be fused together by an extreme momentary pressure. There are large abandoned coal mines in Pa. where they produce the armored panels for the Hum Vee. They a 10' x 10' panels of steel and set in a safe place with adequate solid backing. They attach a steel border around it and lower a similar sheet of soft aluminum on top of it.

Granular Symtex is then dusted on top and smoothed out to a uniform depth. The detonators are positioned so that the charge is ignited from the inside out in a progressive manner. The slo-mo is incredible!

The resulting explosion fuses the dissimilar metals together on a molecular level, bound forever, come what may! The creation is then cut to form via plasma technology and fastened into flat vehicle body panels. The two different metallurgies are allegedly impenetrable by small arms enfilade fire!

What I'm saying here is the result of pounding two soft metals against each other so hard that soft gold fused to soft copper, leaving the telltale traces of yellow metal on the upper die.

There again, a metallurgical exam might show all this!

 

[Tpmetal]

As Matt so kindly said and I for one am proud to be considered the jester or even the village idiot of this panel!

As for the gold aspect. The die could have been used to stamp a design into a small gold disc, thereby leaving a golden residue on the "pressure plate". The fracturing on the Pressure plate reveals that it was beaten stoutly, perhaps until the gold was of a uniform thickness. Take it out trim it till the weight was right and spend it! Virginia was the largest source of gold for many years after the English colonies were formed. It was glacial gold and could be traced all the way back to the Bering sea in later years, with deposits in Ohio and other states as well. There are still places in Va where you can placer mine, and find color. If a certain man had a producing vein on his property and had had an assay proving it's content, he could set up a smelting operation and stamp his own tokens just so he could ID the slug as his. It would un-complicate life a great deal as far the commerce aspect. And, of course, few if any of these slugs exist because they went back to England to make fancies for the crown and secure they're economy.

Point 2. Most folks know that you can't fuse aluminum to steel. Or can you?

Under the right circumstances, two dissimilar metals can be fused together by an extreme momentary pressure. There are large abandoned coal mines in Pa. where they produce the armored panels for the Hum Vee. They a 10' x 10' panels of steel and set in a safe place with adequate solid backing. They attach a steel border around it and lower a similar sheet of soft aluminum on top of it.

Granular Symtex is then dusted on top and smoothed out to a uniform depth. The detonators are positioned so that the charge is ignited from the inside out in a progressive manner. The slo-mo is incredible!

The resulting explosion fuses the dissimilar metals together on a molecular level, bound forever, come what may! The creation is then cut to form via plasma technology and fastened into flat vehicle body panels. The two different metallurgies are allegedly impenetrable by small arms enfilade fire!

What I'm saying here is the result of pounding two soft metals against each other so hard that soft gold fused to soft copper, leaving the telltale traces of yellow metal on the upper die.

There again, a metallurgical exam might show all this!

My grandfather was on the team for Dupont in PA who worked out the kinks with this process specifically for our current "clad" coins. Super cool stuff and your post made me think of him.

 

[Reanm8er]

Merry Christmas Tpmetal to you and yours?

 

[Tpmetal]

Merry Christmas Tpmetal to you and yours?

Merry Christmas to you too

 

[Joe G from Md]

Looks like a flat button to me.

 

[Country Dirt Kid]

I detect a lot of old Amish farms so buttons are new to me. So my question is, Is the shank of a flat button welded or soldered or cast.