Mint

We went to the Royal Canadian Mint. It was in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It was supposed to look like a castle on the outside and had a tall fence and thick gates. We didn't take pictures because pictures were not allowed. We had to wait in a white tent for our tour guide to come because they were doing construction on part of the facade. When we were waiting for our tour guide to come, we saw wooden cutouts of dollar coins (Canadian dollars mind you) with the Vancouver winter Olympic mascots Sumi and Miga. Their faces were cut out so you had to stick your own face in. When the tour guide arrived, he took us inside and the tour began. There were two mints in Canada. One in Winnipeg and one in Ottawa. This one made collector coins, investment coins, and medals. The one in Winnipeg made real circulating money. The workers first took a block of gold and put it in a machine the flattened it with 8 tons of pressure and made it into a coil. They then sent the coil to another room and and made the coil thinner. Then, they flattened it out and punched gold coins out of it. They then cleaned it in a solution and tumbled it around with beads and stuff to make it shiny. They then pressed designs on to it. For investment coins, they mechanically pressed it because they were just investment coins but for collector coins, they hand pressed it. For the investment coins, one person took a bunch of blanks, blew the dust off, and another loaded them in a machine that pressed the designs on to them. All the time, they were wearing rubber gloves so they wouldn't make fingerprints on the coins. For the collector coins, however, only one person worked the machine. He had a magnifying glass to look carefully at the coins and those which were not good had to go into a furnace and back through the process again. Those that were good, he put them one by one into a press and pressed each one eight times with 12 tons of pressure. Then, all the coins were put in boxes and shipped away. We went to the store and there was a 28 kilogram gold bar that they had chained to a table and you could try to lift it. It was so heavy! We bought two collector coins and left.