Coin silver knife part thingys?

Sure,it casts just fine.It is a bit hard for mokume work,but would work.(a lot of work to turn it into clean sheet stock first,though) You could use the coins as spacers on two and three wood handles and Scagel style handles.(Hammer out the quarters to make them wider and thinner). A real nice quarter is perfect to set in the butt of a crown stag handle.I set old Scottish coins in the butt of sgian dubhs (skien duhs) that I make from small deer antler crowns that I get for almost nothing ,because the are too small for regular knives.Dimes would work the same way.
These are a few ideas to kick around while waiting for your shop to thaw out.
 
The thought of melting down old silver for knife furniture has crossd my mind many times. The only thing that stops me every time is the thought that I'd be destroying a piece of history - no matter what condition they are in. They may not be worth much right now, but certainly in 20 years they'll have more value. Once they are gone, they are gone forever.

That said, I've seen makers use Mexican silver coins both as ornamental embellishments and to melt down for other knife things. Pure silver is cheap too. It's cheaper to purchase pure silver bar than it is to purchase titanium.
 
If Trick's collection of old, worn out silver coins is like mine, they really have only silver content value now anyway. No coin collector is going to pay anything other than that for some of the worn coins I have, not even 20 years from now, so I have no problem with the idea of melting them down.
 
This an an old trick with Black Powder Rifle builders. I just go to the coin shop and buy them. They sell them for something like $1.50 for every $1.00 face value.

They can be melted and cast but for the most part, are annealed and cold shaped to what you want.
 
Back in '91 I made a pair of knives and used the crown sections of a big whitetail rack. on the polished crowns I inlayed two uncirculated 99.99% silver undated Morgan dollars, one on each knife handle crown. I placed one heads up, and the other, tails up. The 1 oz. coins actually turned out pretty good on the deer crowns. The coins then just cost a few bucks each. Silver was about $4 per ounce, the coins just a bit higher.I have done quite a bit of inlay using pure silver 1 oz. ingots. I imagine the ingots would be pretty good for making mokume, huh?
 
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