Topic: 3D Printing Physical Bitcoins (Silver) (Read 2550 times)

Before we go into detail on how coins are actually made I think we'd need to see you make a prototype using the 3D printer first to see whether it can actually be done otherwise you'd end up wasting money if you didn't know whether or not the printer worked well in making coins, the reason I say this is because I'm not 100% convinced that a 3D printer is capable of doing such detail on the metal just yet but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this point.

As for the fairly traditional methods of coinage I actually did quite a bit of research on this and I can show you where to go for the coin dies and the machinery, as it so happens machinery and tool wise everything seems to have re-located overseas so you shouldn't have too much problem finding companies that make hydraulic presses, I also happen to have found a guy that is still in business making coin dies, beware though, the coin die is pretty expensive but this person is a proper professional, make sure you're completely happy with your design before you submit it.

http://www.satishhydraulic.net/frame-type-coining-presses.html - This looks like a pretty old and well established company, I haven't tried contacting them yet but there are quite a few Indian companies out there that making presses some even doing custom orders

http://www.ringstamps.com/coining_die.htm - This guy is located in America and responded to my emails when I asked him about cost and the process of making everything, he said it varied from $300 - $1000 per side, so if you want to have something stamped on the back as well then you'd need to pay twice.


The method I'm thinking of uses a mixture of traditional clay casting to make blanks and then the hydraulic press, I haven't yet tried it though because I'd need to get money together, you also need to bear in mind like me you have no reputation and it looks like it's pretty damn difficult to sell anything here unless you've got positive reputation already so you'd have to look at some kind of cheap product to sell.

Also, here's where I got my idea from, it would be pretty simple to get the right diameter to match the coin press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6T_ZutXzNQ

I may actually try this method entirely by hand but I'm not 100% sure whether it will work, hydraulic presses seem to be the modern way to go because you need a certain amount of tonnage in order to make sure coins get properly stamped with the die and hydraulic presses mean one person can essentially do the work without too much trouble or effort, not only more efficient but it's supposed to be safer to use the hydraulic press.

Thanks for taking interest. But the problem here is not money, cause we want to invest on it for a long term. There are many problems. First problem is that we are from India. In India, availability is a big problem. You cant directly get what you want but in US and other countries that's not a problem. Second thing, I am not saying I am going to print the metal cheaply. The silver here costs 42000 INR per Kilogram (That's how it is measured in India. We use metric system.). Or at present BTC conversion rate, 1.7 BTC or nearly 700 USD. So, we don't want to do cheap trades but we want to achieve the best quality we can with the 3D printer. We can manage to get a coin die and hydraulics but the problem is we don't have enough knowledge on that.

Can you please tell me if we would be needing goldsmith hydraulic press machine to mint coins and how can we get a coin die made and all the other things we need to take care of ?

But I would rather say we can just create a 3D model of the coin and melt the metal and use our 3D printer. We would first get one done for ourself and if we like the quality, we will post it here and let others comment on it. We would try to achieve the best quality we can.

It depends on how much detail you can achieve with the 3D printer, It would certainly be possible, but aren't metal 3D printers still pretty expensive? You'd have to mint several thousand coins before you even broke even and that's without any guarantee that they will sell. I think it would be easier personally to do some cast versions with wax and use coin presses rather than doing it expensively but I dunno, unless you're telling me you can 3D print the metal cheaply I'm not sure it would be worth it.

I've researched this for my own businesses and the usual way of making coins with modern equipment is to get a coin die made and stamp it into a blank using a hydraulic press of some kind that can hold a die, so you'd need to go into more detail of how you actually plan to make these coins before deciding whether it's worth it or not.

Some trusted members here in the community here mint and sell silver, gold and other precious metals' physical bitcoins. My question is that I live in India. Here, we can get silver and other precious metal bars (.999 Pure). Me and my friend have built a 3D printer that uses additive printing to print things upto the tissue level or upto the micron level. Can anyone just tell me that can we achieve the levels of physical bitcoins with the 3D printer like the Casascius coins and Silver Wallets ? I mean casascius coins and silver wallets are minted. They use very good quality equipment to do that. Can we just 3D print those ? Yes, we can do that but can we achieve the quality like the coins below.



A Casascius Silver Physical BTC



The Silver Wallet Physical BTC