North Idaho native Randy Kramer has opened Gem State Mint, in Coeur d'Alene, bringing to fruition his long-running dream to manufacture coin-sized medallions of his own design, he says.

Kramer, who has 20 years of experience at two other mints, began gathering equipment with hopes of starting his own operation about seven years ago, when he acquired the showcases that now display his work at the recently opened shop at 210 E. Sherman, in the Resort Plaza Shops, in downtown Coeur d'Alene.

Since then, he has acquired a coin-engraving machine from the Sunshine Mint, also of Coeur d'Alene, that cuts the dies used for the images. Two years ago, he located a hydraulic press on the East Coast and bought it to complete the major equipment he would need to manufacture coins.

"It's scary," Kramer says of starting a new retail and manufacturing business at the age of 51. "But I had the opportunity and decided it was time to jump into it."

The equipment is set up inside the retail shop in plain public view.

"People can come in and see the process of how coins are made right here," he says.

His main designs so far feature a bald eagle, a cutthroat trout, and a bull moose. He's currently working on the next design, a steam locomotive. He's also working on custom designs for the nearby Coeur d'Alene Resort and the Byrd Aviation & Invention Center, in Sagle, Idaho.

"My designs feature Idaho," says Kramer, who was born in Sandpoint and also lived in St. Maries before his family moved to Post Falls when he was about 10 years old. "Once I get going, I'd like to branch out into Pacific Northwest designs."

Kramer begins the process of creating the medallions by drawing concept images from which he selects a design for each side of the coin.

The initial images fill an 8-inch diameter circle on a regular piece of drawing paper.

"That's large enough to get a lot of good detail, but not too big for the engraving machine," he says.

Kramer then traces the image onto a sheet of translucent paper, turns it over and mounts it on a soft plate of plaster, and traces the image through the back side of the paper, leaving a reverse-image impression of the original drawing on the plaster.

He carves that impression into the plaster, making a concave, or negative, mold of the image. When the negative mold is complete, he pours a layer of harder plaster over it which, when separated from the softer plaster, creates a positive mold of the image on which he sculpts the final details.

In the next step, he pours an epoxy resin over the positive mold, which cures for a couple of days into a hard cast, creating the final oversized negative mold that will be used on the engraving machine.

With its gears, wheels, spindles, and counterweights, the motorcycle-sized engraving machine looks somewhat like the inner workings of a giant antique clock. Although the German-made Friedrich Augenstein engraver was manufactured in 1972, it uses much the same image-reduction technology to create coin-sized dies that was developed in the late 1800s.

Once installed on the engraving machine, the resin cast turns like a slowly rotating, horizontally mounted phonograph record, while a stylus moves even more slowly from the outside of the image to the center, maintaining contact and moving in and out with the contours of the image. During that 15-hour process, the machine scales down the movement of the stylus while a fine cutting tool on another part of the machine carves a coin-sized negative image onto a steel die.

Kramer says it took six months to become proficient at adjusting counterweights on the engraver to maintain the optimum amount of pressure between the stylus and the resin plate.

Too much pressure can tear up the resin, while not enough causes the stylus to bounce, degrading the image cut into the die, he says.

Kramer says his greatest challenge, though, was in finding the right shape for the cutting tips for making the dies.

The diamond-hard cutting tool is only about as thick as a human hair and looks like a phonograph needle to the naked eye, but it has to be shaped in such a way as to remove the filings, or chips, as it cuts the image into the die.

Kramer says he tried contacting other mints for advice, but they considered the information proprietary and declined to disclose such secrets.

He even had to buy equipment to make his own cutting tips.

"I tried over 20 different shapes and figured out one that stays sharp through the entire cut with good results," he says.

After a die is cut, Kramer fixes any imperfections in it and polishes it for about two hours.

He has to repeat the process to make the die for the other side of the coin.

At this point, the steel dies are comparatively soft, so the dies are heat-treated in a high-temperature oven to harden them, making them capable of producing thousands of identical coins.

"Once you have the dies, you can make as many coins as you want," Kramer says.

The actual manufacturing of the coins is the easiest part of the process.

Once fitted onto the hydraulic press, the dies sandwich the coin blank with 160 tons of pressure, melding the blank into the mold, while a collar fitted around the blank regulates the diameter of the coin.

The process of designing the image and manufacturing the die takes three to four weeks.

Once the dies are set in the press, however, it only takes Kramer about 45 seconds to manufacture each coin.

Kramer has priced his solid silver 1-ounce coins at $70. Silver-plated 1-ounce coins, which are made with brass or copper blanks, are priced at $20.

He also can make, smaller, quarter-ounce medallions with the equipment.

Kramer began his career in minting in 1991, when he was a Post Falls resident freshly out of college with a teaching degree from Eastern Washington University.

While he was looking for teaching jobs, a friend asked him to help set up the Alaska Mint, a private mint in Anchorage, Alaska. He stayed there for five years, and got his start in manufacturing coins by running hydraulic presses.

When Kramer, now a Coeur d'Alene resident, returned to North Idaho, he got on with Sunshine Mint, where he worked three years doing similar work in the coining department. Then he moved to the engraving department, where he worked another 12 years.

"In the coining department, I saw how different designs worked better than others," Kramer says. "Then I learned a lot from the artists at Sunshine."

While at Sunshine, he missed the retail side of the business that he had experienced at the Alaska Mint, he says.

At his new shop, Kramer says he hopes to come up with a new original design every couple of months.

"As Gem State Mint gets going, I hope to add more medallions and jewelry made from medallions," he says.

He's also having some medallions sized for accessories, such as money clips, belt buckles, and key chains.

Outside of minting and a couple of high school art classes, Kramer says his artistry is mostly self-taught. He says he comes from a family of artists. Some of his brother's paintings are on sale at the Gem State Mint, which also carries other work by a couple of other local artists.