Tooling

Tooling refers to the use of tools to engrave or smooth a coin in order to make it appear to be something better or more valuable than it really is. There can be a very fine line between some types of mechanical cleaning (removing encrustations by picking or scraping) and tooling, and not everyone agrees on exactly where that line should be drawn. For the most part, what follows applies more to bronze coins. Silver and gold coins are very difficult to tool, as it is almost impossible to hide the tool marks left on the surfaces, and most forgers are aware that tooling of silver and gold coins will generally give very bad results.

There are three types of tooling that are clearly involved in fraudulent intentions :

Forgery Touch-up Work

Some forgers will use a variety of tools to remove signs of casting (mould seams, raised bumps due to casting bubbles, etc) to "touch up" their fakes and make them more difficult to spot. Also, as discussed in previous sections, many forging methods result in significant loss of detail between the prototype coins and the finished forgeries they copy. Some forgers will use engraving tools to "crisp up" the details hoping to make them look closer to the originals.

Sometimes this is also done in reverse. One sometimes sees fake coins which have been artificially worn and/or artificially aged to make them look like well used old coins. We include this here, because it is, in a vague sense of the word, a form of tooling.

As the base coin are a fakes to start with, tooling them to make them look more like the originals just goes to proving fraudulant intent. At that point the question as to if they might be reproductions to be sold as reproductions or used in jewellery has been answered in the negative, and intentional fraud must be assumed.

Improving Grades

Virtually all ancient coins are dug from the ground, and ancient bronze coins are often found with heavy encrustations, and/or heavy patinations, that obscure many of the coins' details and so have to be cleaned. The encrustations are deposited on the surface from outside sources, so mechanical cleaning, by scraping and picking away the encrustations, is not disturbing the original coins, and can be a highly effective cleaning method if done by a skilled cleaner (an unskilled cleaner can create one heck of a mess). Such cleaning is not tooling and there is nothing ethically wrong with it; it is common practive.

Patination is mineralization formed from metal on a coin's surface, so is part of the original coin. Anything that removes part of the patination is removing part of the coin's surface, and so is a type of tooling. The problem is that as metal is altered into a patina, it expands, resulting in a thickening that can obscure details originally there. Since the metal below the patina normally follows the contours of the original surface, thinning a heavy patina may make those details again visible, without actually carving new details. A skilled cleaner can do this in such a way as to expose the details, without exposing any of the underlying metal. While this is still a form of tooling, it is generally an accepted practice and in truth, if done well is virtually undetectable. A related process is to carve down lumps in the patination to smooth them out and make the coin look better, a process known as "smoothing" and which is again often undetectable as long as a layer of original patination remains. When the mechanical cleaning or smoothing leaves marks that make it detectable, you will often see coins described as "smoothed". Some collectors disapprove of this type of tooling/cleaning, and others do not. It is a personal choice.

The problem comes when the person thinning the patination is actually carving it to create details that were not present when the patina formed. Or even worse they go right through the patination (or remove it) so that the metal of the coin is engraved to create new details. At this point, we enter the realm of true "tooling" that is fraudulent and borders on being a type of forgery.

The coin above had most of the hair and rostral crown details worn away in circulation. It has been tooled (engraved) to re-create those details, raising the grade from Fine to VF. On this coin the metal of the coin was engraved and retoned, but it really makes no difference if the patina was carved, or solid metal engraved, it is at best fraud bordering on forgery, even though the base coin was genuine.

Just as bad are coins found with edges corroded off, or large corrosion pits, that had those areas rebuilt or filled in. Such rebuilds or infills are often done with epoxy resins mixed with powered patination products scraped from the coin (or otherwise artifically coloured), but we have recently seen coins with lead or solder melted into pitted areas to smooth them. While not exactly tooling, this is a related fraud that we feel belongs best in this section.

Changing Designs

The borderline distinction between tooling and cleaning might need not be debated when an otherwise genuine but common ancient coin is tooled so as to remove existing details, or add details that were never on the coin in the first place, normally with the intent of making a common coin appear to be a rare type. We have seen a number of Vespasian sestertii with common reverse types that had been either shaved down to remove the old type, or built up with epoxy to cover it over, and then carved/tooled to create a much more valuable Judaea Capta reverse. Such coins usually show a very strange style and capturing the look and feel of die striking is not possible with this method, but there are some fairly skilled people that do a pretty convincing job of it.

The specimen below (image provided to us by Heather Howard, who called this "MR. TOOLEY"), is probably one of the most blatent and obvious (even without magnification) tooling jobs we have ever seen. While it is so poorly done it is not dangerous to anyone but the most novice of collectors, it does illustrate the basics of what tooling is about.

It appears to have started out as a very worn but genuine ancient bronze. So little of the original design remains (just the forehead, cheek and neck) that determing the original type is no longer possible. The grade has been improved from Good to VF. Almost all the details now visible on the obverse (except for the outline of the portrait) are probably very different than what was originally there, and it is likely the rather odd-looking building on the reverse has nothing to do with the original reverse type.

A coin tooled this badly and to this degree is obvious. Please remember that some are not. Tooled coins almost always show marks left behind from the tools used on them, and a good magnifying glass or microscope is very useful in spotting them.

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