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[i]An Australian entrepreneur named Mervyn C. Cole acquired a 30-pound fragment of the craft following its crash and he is now marketing gold and silver medals that incorporate bits of metal from that piece. This metal from Skylab, described by Mr. Cole as a complex stainless steel-based alloy, forms a central plug in each medal... Initially, Kara International planned to strike medals made entirely of the metal from the spacecraft... However, with Skylab, this technique turned out to be impractical. First, the spacecraft fragment wasn't big enough; it wouldn't have permitted production of a large enough issue. Second, and more important, the metal proved too hard for normal minting. Eventually, the company hit upon the notion of using Skylab metal as an insert and making the medals primarily of other materials. ...problems persisted even with the modified minting approach. Although they accounted for just a small portion of the overall area of the medals, the space-metal inserts frequently shattered the dies. On one occasion 300 silver medals were found to have hairline cracks and all were returned to the smelter. The problems were finally surmounted by striking planchets with two matching deep indentations in the center, into which two dumps were placed. This solution was found, as Mr. Cole recalls it, "just as many of us were about convinced the whole job might be an impossibility."[/i]
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