A Unique Request, a New Process, Just Another Day at Signature Coins
If there’s one singular truth about working with Signature Coins it’s this: If you make an unusual request for your challenge coin order, we’ll do everything in our power to make it happen. Whether it’s coating your coins in cerakote or hiding a bottle opener in the flippers of a sea turtle. If you can dream it up, we can find a way to bring it to life.
When a customer came to us asking to have metal shavings embedded in his coin, we assured him that while it was a unique request, we could certainly make it happen. As a result, we’ve been lucky enough to help create one of the more interesting and unique coins we’ve seen. We’ve created coins with glitter in the enamel before, but nothing we’ve made has the same kind of shimmer as these coins. When your guiding principal with your customers is to say yes, the door opens for amazing things to happen.
Military Systems Group
MIlitary Systems Group has been in the business of creating and innovating weapons mounting systems for over three decades. They not only run analysis to tackle specific and unique problems, they also do all of the machining and manufacturing to bring their solutions to life. This means that the leaders and employees at MSG understand what it’s like to work and operate within a manufacturing facility. It’s something we have in common given the amount of machining that goes on in our production facility.
Zak Pantaleo contacted us about wanting to create a challenge coin for his team. With so many of the people at MSG coming from a military background, the challenge coin tradition is something they have a lot of history with.
Pantaleo wanted a fairly simple and straightforward coin, not much more than the company’s logo, but it was an experience from his military background that served as the inspiration for the unique addition he wanted to make to his coins.
Back when I was in the military, we shipped back some spent shell casings fired in combat, and melted them down into our deployment coins. I thought it was a real special way to incorporate what we were doing,
In the spirit of that special memory, Pantaleo requested that we take some of the metal shavings that tend to accumulate in the MSG facility and incorporate them into the company’s challenge coin. “It would be awesome to send you some of the chips from our machines and have you melt them in or mix the dust with the paint. Is that possible? The one constant throughout the plant is machining chips everywhere… mostly aluminum.” As is our guiding principle, we said yes we could make it happen, and then we set to work figuring out exactly how to go about executing his vision.
Finding the Best Way to Bring Ideas to Life
For Pantaleo, the existence of the metal chips within the coin was enough.
Melting them down would be unconventional, but even if we could grind them up and dust them into the paint or coat the coin in a clear coat that traps them in would be awesome. Just knowing they are in there is enough… wouldn’t even need to see them,
But given how important this request was to him, we knew we had to make sure we could not only do it, but do it well.
We forwarded the metal chips on to our production team and requested that they mix the small pieces in with the black paint used in the coin’s colorfill. After trying it with one coin, our production team got back to us with a picture that proved this process wouldn’t be as easy as mixing metal into the paint and calling it a day.
Given our process of stamping, plating and then adding color to the coins, it was impossible to add the metal to the paint, colorfill the coin like normal, and then wipe any excess paint off the coins without scratching the coins’ surface and creating an inferior product. Our production team assured us that it’s not possible to add paint to the colorfill areas of a coin without some small amount of spillage. Those spills then have to be wiped away from the areas that aren’t getting color, but when the paint contains small metal chips, wiping off the excess drags those chips across the coin’s surface and causes scratches.
The decision was made to create the coins like normal and then mix the metal chips with a clear epoxy and apply that to one of the coin faces. The result is a coin that both looks great and still feels unique. Epoxy coated coins can sometimes have an artificial feel to them. Without the texture of the raised and recessed levels, the coins often feel as though they’re lacking something. But because these coins have the metal shavings in the epoxy, a more unique texture is created. The difference is subtle, but when you handle as many different coins as we do, it’s also noticeable.
Truly Unique, Truly Personal
The back side of the MSG coins feature sequential numbering. With that upgrade option, each of the coins were sure to already be unique and individual from all the rest. However, Pantaleo took it all a step further and created something that’s unlike any other coin we’ve ever seen before. The addition of the metal shavings overtop of the company logo bring together two things that are uniquely specific to this customer.
There’s a sense of pride that comes along with bringing someone’s important vision to life. To tap into this personal story from Pantaleo’s history and bring it into the present is something we don’t take lightly. And we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it without our willingness to say yes to out of the ordinary customer requests.
