Coin artist creates jewelry

Bill Saathoff isn't a con artist. He's a coin artist.

Saathoff creates art from coins, but he doesn’t try to pass his coin art off as money. Instead, the law-abiding winter resident fully discloses the fact that the coins he has turned into jewelry are no longer considered money.

While many people who see his coin art shown locally and around the country are under the assumption that it’s illegal to “deface” coins, he says it’s not, according to a federal law.

“What the law basically says is, you can do anything to American currency as long as you don’t do it with the intent to defraud,” Saathoff explains.

So with nothing but relaxation and honorable intentions in mind, he cuts coins to his heart’s contentment. Creating coin art is “like being in another world. I’m relaxed and I just forget everything else, just thinking about what I’m doing."

Using a jeweler’s saw, drill bits the size of embroidery needles and a homemade vice grip, Saathoff makes earrings, necklaces and hat tacks with coins ranging from silver dollars to Mercury dimes. He uses no electricity whatsoever. “I do everything by hand."

First, he drills tiny holes in a coin and then inserts the saw blade through a hole. Next, he clamps the blade down, tightens it up “about like a fiddle string” and starts cutting along the line of whatever he’s carving out, such as a buffalo on a nickel or the Statue of Liberty on a presidential gold dollar.

He carves out entire buffaloes on original buffalo nickels and uses them to make earrings or pendants. When he makes jewelry with new buffalo nickels, however, he cuts out the area along the outline of each buffalo and leaves the outer edge of the coin intact.

Saathoff enjoys carving out different designs on state quarters, whether that be saguaros on Arizona's or musical instruments on Tennessee's. Sometimes, he freehands cut-out designs such as crosses or stars in the centers of other coins.

He was wearing a Morgan silver dollar pendant while he was recently showing his coin art at the Farmers Market held at Gila Mountain United Methodist Church in the Foothills. He had spent about eight hours carving the coin, painstakingly cutting around each letter of every word around the coin’s edge.

He speculates that he won’t have the pendant long, as he sells such pendants fairly quickly despite the fact that they are the most expensive items on his table. He’s been known to take them off his neck to sell them after he runs out of the ones on display.

His wife, Marilyn, is not quite so willing to part with her pendant, however. Gently lifting it from her chest, she says it is a 1946 Walking Liberty half-dollar that Saathoff carved when he began his coin carving hobby 45 years ago.

Although he was working full time back then, he is now retired and has more time to enjoy the hobby. He sells his jewelry from $2 to about $200 at art shows in the Yuma area, as well as other parts of the country.

He became interested in the hobby after seeing a fellow at a flea market carving coins back in the 1960s. After “pestering” the guy for about an hour, he had learned what tools to get, where to get them and how to use them to carve coins.

In turn, he enjoys teaching anyone who’s interested in trying their hand at it.

Saathoff will be carving coins at the Yuma Potpourri Artists Old Fashioned Arts & Crafts Show at the Foothills Library, 13226 E. South Frontage Road, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information about the show, call Hunter at 345-0242.