Executive Summary History

I started the Shields Mint in 1980, I think in March.  At first we had a die set that had an ejector pin that left a round imprint in the center of the reverse. This with Capital G&A on the obverse. It was made for a fellow named Fred Isaacs who I really enjoyed working with.  I don't think any other obverse had the ejector pin imprint.  I could be wrong about that. So a bar with the imprint of the ejector pin is very rare.  Later, we had a die set made that did away with the ejector pin imprint as the whole reverse plate moved up and down. I also made a bar for a fellow named Peter Covert with Minix on the obverse and a couple hundred for a golf tournament in Hilton Head called a "Silver Shootout" but I forget the name of the golfer who contracted for that although I think his first name was Mike.  We only made a few hundred at most  like that.  I think that a total of the Shields Mint (with my Irish and English family coats of arms on the obverse) were around 250,000 over a three year period. I offered some artists a prize for the best design and chose the final design from about six entries.  I closed the Mint on December 9, 1982.  The market had gone flat, people lost interest in silver and gold and I didn't have any sales.

The main piece of equipment I needed was a rolling mill.  This is a pic of me and my Rouselle rolling mill which squashed the silver billets from a thickness of about 1/2 inch to .0625 inches and increased the length from about a foot to about 6 feet.  We kept the rollers polished with diamond dust to impart a brilliant finish to the silver.

In the background is my small punch press that I used to cut the blanks that were made into the finished bar.

History

I started the Shields Mint in 1980 when someone who I dealt gold and silver with complained that there was no reliable source of one ounce silver bars.  That started me researching and the result, as they say, is history.
This will be the history of the Shields Mint.