fox-and-the-hound

I agree, do not cover it up. It's a work of art and already seen in every school library with an art history book. Besides, it's your coin, your statement and your personal mark. Go for it

Photoshop, although readily available to those with the dollars, is a very heavy-duty program. I've been using it for personal and professional work for almost 20 years and I'm still finding new tricks and tactics for it all the time. My advice would be to consider taking a beginer design course. Courses are often found at local colleges and even high schools (usually free at high schools). It's not a fast solution for your coin design, but it will help take you a long way in a small amount of time. Short of that, befriend someone who already knows it and trade for their help! There are even a few of us who will help in return for a finished coin - nudge, nudge!

Wow...I had no idea LE's were so evocative. We're thinking of producing some very special LE's and we've agreed that they will only be placed in caches of the very highest caliber. We like the idea of an "award" coin for caches that involve multiple steps, long miles of hiking, extended thought, etc. We realize some cachers go to extraordinary efforts to put great caches in place because of location, difficult terrrain, great educational experiences and the like so it should provide a great additional reward for the next person to come along! It will be our way of thanking our fellow cachers for their hard work. Hope you find one out there...maybe you'll get to like those LE's!

It's certainly not free, but Illustrator and other vertice producing programs go a long way toward keeping your original artwork all the way to the end. Bitmapped art has to be re-drawn by the coin producer's artists and will probably never be exactly the same as your original creation.

We love it! It's the very heart of what we do and shows the love we have for our playground. We're new and haven't been to any events yet, but we've been participating in the CITO ideal long before we ever knew about caching. I'd be very interested in purchasing. Thanks for starting this thread and for your work in designing the coin - F&tH

That's a nice setup. Can anyone join or is strictly for members? Are there some basic rules, etc? I'd like to learn more. I'm trying to get things moving before I go on vacation in the White Mountains area in a couple of weeks to release some of these tokens into the wild!

I just tried a direct send to see what happens. Here's the message I received yesterday: Undelivered Mail Returned This is the Postfix program at host signal.Groundspeak.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster> If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message. The Postfix program

Those are great! What are the 2" disks made from? Are they pretty rigid? How does the resin hold up over time? I've noticed a couple cachers said they are printing with inkjet. Have you experienced any problems with color fade?

I like this a lot. Anything to keep it moving instead of hoarded! btw: LFD - tried to send you a message through gc.com yesterday and it bounced. Did you change address and not update?

Thanks Lemon Fresh Dog for the input. I love the GEOBONE! Thanks Pengy&Tigger for the punch idea. I'll try and see if I can find a 32mm to speed up production.

I'm using an exacto knife and scissors. It's not fast, but I can still assemble one in less than a minute while watching tv. Fox said I could look into a stamping die (like a hollow chisel) that you can order in different sizes, but I just wanted to get it going and keep the cost down for now.

Is casting your token in metal the only thing required to be a "geocoin"? I'm looking around and I keep seeing other oddities that are called coins even if they are shaped like pins or keys, etc. I'm not even going to get into the raging arguement over why some people are using "virtual" coins or how a solid token doesn't seem to rate along with these phantoms for credibility. What makes or breaks the definition of a coin?

Oh...I see what you mean. For the ones I would have to track myself that's a great solution! Do you happen to know who set up their site?

Marky's smashed coins are great. If he could use a metal engraver or sharp nail to scratch a number in the back then it could be tracked. I forgot to mention that a major advantage of producing a token like these is that you can use gradient colors unlike enamels and that includes photographs!

I suppose you could buy numbers from gc.com like anyone else and just type the number into your artwork and print. That's what I'm doing for the travelertags versions. I'm also releasing some with an email address so I can take part in keeping tabs on the travels by logging travels by cachers who pass along emails. I'll have to wait and see what works best I guess. I don't know if gc.com has numbers specific to coins versus tokens versus travel bugs, but anything can be printed and produced quickly and affordably using this method.

I'll have to search again, but the site I've gone with for now is travelertags.com because they'll give you at least 5 for creating an account and 5 more for emailing a friend about it. After that there are other promotions to get more free. If you just want to cut to the chase, they sell blocks of 10 for a $ per number and will even register/provide minted coin numbers. They have a tracking system that seems pretty good, but I've only been looking it over for a couple weeks.

Does a coin have to be metal? I've seen plastic disks, wooden nickels and traveler tags that are also trackable. How do you classify and list these items?

I know paper is low-end, but it's also affordable. The probable with paper is that ink tends to bleed and colors die over time. The coin case is supposed to be airproof and waterproof so paper should be ok and laser toner shouldn't ever fade.

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I forgot to mention, printed on 110lb. cardstock from a laser printer before cutting and inserting into the safes. Each back can be customized with an individual tracking number. There are a number of place that will even give you 5 or 10 tracking numbers free to get started and about a buck a # after that. Or you can simply add your email address and keep tabs on individual coins yourself for free.

I can't afford to have hundreds of metal tokens minted right now. So I put together my artwork in AI, printed it at 1200dpi, cut it and encased it (back to back) in an acrylic Air Tite brand coin safe. btw-how do i post a pic here?

First things first...I'm new. So I looked around. I read your coin posts. I found my solution to the most common problems I hear about. Coins are expensive to make and trackable numbers are expensive to buy. So I made my own solution...I designed a full-color, two sided coin/token with trackable numbers and produced them for less than 30 cents per piece. Talked to moun10man and he informed me that this really falls more into a token category than a coin, but let's see how it works. Is any one interested in doing the same?

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