Size mismatches within a coin "family"

[<k>]

the 5 kronor is round and brass, and bigger than the 10 kronor, also round and brass.

FosseWay's comments refer to the Swedish coinage. Now I wonder why Sweden did that?


Value   10 Kronor
Metal   Nordic Gold
Weight   6.6 g
Diameter   20.5 mm
Thickness   2.87 mm
Shape   Round

Year   2016
Value   5 Kronor
Metal   Nordic Gold
Weight   6.1 g
Diameter   23.75 mm
Thickness   1.97 mm
Shape   Round

[Figleaf]

I liked the nickel brass 10 francs - it had a very 1970s "jazz fusion" sort of design.    Why did they change it? It was a nice size at 26 mm, but maybe a bit heavy at 10 g.  The nickel version was 21 mm and 6.5 g - a similar thickness at around 2.5 mm, though.

It was replaced because it was the most faked coin in circulation. At the time, there was a civil war going on in Lebanon, based on Syrian malice. The Beqaa valley was in fact held by small but vicious militias and they used faking coins as a source of income. Their experience went into North Africa, as the fakes reached France by way of the ferries from North Arica. When Beqaa could at last go back to producing excellent wine, North Africa took over the production of fake coins. The spate of fake UK round pounds may at least partly originate from the same North African sources. History hounds us and we increasingly ignore it.

Peter

[FosseWay]

FosseWay's comments refer to the Swedish coinage. Now I wonder why Sweden did that?


Value   10 Kronor
Metal   Nordic Gold
Weight   6.6 g
Diameter   20.5 mm
Thickness   2.87 mm
Shape   Round

Year   2016
Value   5 Kronor
Metal   Nordic Gold
Weight   6.1 g
Diameter   23.75 mm
Thickness   1.97 mm
Shape   Round

This is pure speculation, but I wonder whether it's the result of a change in plan halfway through. The new-spec 5 kr would have worked fine if it was in white metal - it wouldn't have been in the same "family" as the 10 kronor then, and the relationship wouldn't have been any more odd than the fact that the UK 10p is wider than the £1 or the 5 eurocents wider than the 10c. I wonder, therefore, whether the original plan had been for a white-metal 5 kr, but this was rejected because of allergy issues. For reasons I'm not clear on, there has been an undercurrent of complaint for some time in Sweden about the unsuitability of nickel as a coinage metal because of allergies. Never mind that the "nickel" in the previous coinage was actually mostly copper, or that everywhere else in Europe manages fine with cupro-nickel, or that a number of countries have or have had pure nickel coins without apparent problems. Nickel is a heavy metal that is toxic, never mind allergenic, if ingested and introduced into the circulatory system and organs. So is copper, but there isn't a similar outcry in that case. And ingesting coins is hardly a widespread issue, I'd have thought.