Cold-Forged Souvenir

I slid a shiny copper penny into the notched steel feed tray of the hand-crank souvenir press. The mechanical reduction on the machine's exposed brass spur gears looked hefty enough to compress an engine block. I grabbed the cast-iron crank handle with both hands, leaned my weight into the downward arc, and turned. You could feel every tooth of the drive gear bite into the roller, squeezing the soft metal under dozens of pounds of raw mechanical leverage. With a heavy, satisfying clank, out popped a warm, stretched oval of polished copper, cleanly stamped with a smoking caldera. Proof that with enough torque, even pocket change will happily flow like liquid basalt.