It’s hard to believe, but when I started my first shop in 1991 having a computer was a pretty big deal. I remember when we bought our first “engineering” computer with a whopping 40 megs of memory! Back then, each meg cost $40…imagine having $1,600 invested in a computer today with only 40 megs of memory – I think Windows uses more than that just to install it today!

Anyway, back then we did our “3-D” work with very sophisticated German-made duplicators called “Deckles.” At on time back in the mid-90′s, I kept 3 Deckles running 12 hours every single day building toy molds for Little Tikes. Little Tikes supplied us with the 3-d patterns, and we in turn duplicated them into steel to make injection molds for their parts.

As time went on,  it got to the point where I could pretty much copy anything, and the word got around that I was pretty good at it and pretty inexpensive.

One day, a couple of guys showed up with an old, worn-out coining die and asked me if I could make them a new die by tracing the old one. Hmmm…

It’s hard to turn down work, but the old die was just too worn out to make a decent copy from. I explained to them that if the pattern is fuzzy, the “new” die will be fuzzy also…you’ll just get an exact copy of a worn-out die and get the same results.

Thank-God that I couldn’t do this job. Apparently, after they left my shop they decided to go with what they had and started stamping these coins out in the back room of their used car lot!

A few months later, they were all on the front page of the Erie paper for being arrested by the Secret Service for running a counterfeit racket.

In the end, anything that has monetary value – slot machine tokens, car wash tokens, and probably even coupons in the paper – are considered as cash by the Treasury Department and the Secret Service doesn’t like to see any “copies” floating around!

For some reason, I’ve kept the coin they brought in that day  for almost 20 years – you can clearly see “Atlantic City” on it!