Talk:Coronet of Charles, Prince of Wales

Plastic

@Ghughesarch: The coronet is plastic electroformed with two shades of gold. Platinum costs 60 times more than silver; if they were going to use a precious metal as the base, then it would have been silver, as is tradition with coronets. The settings for the diamonds are platinum, and if you look very closely at the bottom of the fleurs-de-lis, you can see that they are reinforced with platinum uprights. I have added further sources. Firebrace (talk) 00:01, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

@Firebrace:however in electroforming the mould or mandrell is usually detached from the finished piece on completion - is this known for certain not have been the case with the coronet? I'd always understood that a plastic model of the coronet was made from which the metal final version was "cast" (for want of a better word). Also, this source http://aroyalheraldry.weebly.com/blog/kind-hearts-and-coronets claims "Prince Charles was invested with a very modern interpretation of this Coronet in 1969 which was of pure gold after the first, electroformed, version disintegrated when the hallmarks were applied." That doesn't sound so reliable, but the detail of exactly how the coronet was made, and whether it retains a resin core, or was electroformed around one which was then removed, isn't clear from the extra sources you've given (at least because they aren't available to read online). The Royal Collection's description (and they should know, though it's a poor online catalogue description) suggests it's all metal. Ghughesarch (talk) 00:12, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

It appears that the gold was electroformed onto the inside of a negative mould which was then removed to leave the free-standing gold coronet. See 'Gold Electroforms and Heavy Electrodeposits: Decorative and Industrial Applications' by Dirk Withey, in Gold Bulletin, 1983, page 70: "Cylindrical shapes - as in the case of the production of the Prince of Wales coronet (2), these objects can be made by forming onto the inside of an open-structured cylindrical mould. A rigid, two-part construction is used to avoid flexing during deposition and to allow the final article to be removed at the end of the process". However, a couple of points: you have cited a blog which may have taken its information from an older version of this article. Non-expert blogs are not WP:reliable and we ignore them. Wikipedia also prefers secondary sources, and the Royal Collection is a primary source. They have chosen not to mention the manufacturing technique that was used on the coronet, or the ping-pong ball monde, and this is a reason why secondary, uninvolved sources are preferred over primary sources. Your reverting of all the edits I made to the article yesterday was unacceptable, and it is the sort of behaviour that has marked you out as a trouble-maker. Don't do it again... Firebrace (talk) 01:14, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

My apologies for the effect of my edit to the article - I received a notification that you had reverted my edit and believed that I was only changing that - in comparing the previous edits, for some reason the whole of your other recent contributions apart from that reversion did not show up (looking at the article history my edit undid 19 characters, which did not seem to be the many hundreds of your additions and I wrongly accepted that as being the minor change I wanted to make). I'm well aware of what reliable and unreliable sources are and that is why I said that the heraldry blog seemed unreliable. However, it seems that the coronet is not, in fact, gold-plated plastic and that was the point of my querying it. Ghughesarch (talk) 01:26, 20 November 2016 (UTC)