Mint officials gave the media a tour of their West Point plant Friday, with the Sept. 11 medal as the featured product.

The medal-making process might look simple, but there's a lot going on in those few moments. Production manager Jennifer Butkus said there are 217 metric tons of pressure bearing down on those blank coins.

Every Sept. 11 medal is one ounce of 99.9 percent pure silver. Jeanette Grogan, who's in charge of quality control, sees to that.

Not every medal is passed along for sale to the public. At another work station a few feet from Goda, die-setter Justin Pagan checked each finished medal, occasionally tossing one in a discard container.

"This one is no good," Pagan said, pointing to a tiny flaw in one medal that only an expert would notice. The discarded medals eventually will be melted down and recycled.

The Sept. 11 National Medal was authorized by Congress to mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on that day in 2001. The West Point and Philadelphia mints began turning them out last year and will continue to do so through the end of this year.

Congress authorized up to 2 million medals to be made, but, said mint spokesman Michael White, "We produce to (meet) demand."

So far, just more than 160,000 medals have been turned out by the mint - about 98,000 at West Point and about 64,000 at the Philadelphia plant.

The $66.95 price includes a $10 surcharge that will go to support the operation and maintenance of the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center site in New York City.

The mint says that in the modern era, it has produced only two other silver medals available to the public for sale, and this is the first one made at the West Point plant since it was built in 1937.

To read the complete article, see:West Point facility mints silver coins marking 9/11anniversary(www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120519/NEWS/205190327)

To read the complete article, see:United States Mint strikes 9/11 medals raising more than $1.6 million for the memorial(www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=55455)