Challenge Coin Holders Research I

A friend of mine contacted me the other day about making some navy coin holders. Not knowing what that really was, I looked it up and figured out that this could be a great product too around this area (Norfolk).

The story revolves around these basically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin



Not knowing the first thing about these coins, I educated myself and now know what these actually mean to the service members. That's a pretty awesome concept and I'm in for it, to make these holders for them!

So, how do we go about it? Obviously, not being a service member, I needed some sample coins.
Turns out, you can get some on Amazon - they are not cheap, but I ordered a few of them to play around with. Took a while, but they came in the other day. Very intricate products, wow!

To prototype, I chose the shape of a Beatles Yellow Submarine for the profile cut - but what I was really after was to see how wide and deep the flutes need to be, in order to display each coin in the best possible angle.

Turns out that with just a 1/4" end mill, this won't look quite right.
First I went 0.25" deep, that didn't work for the coins at all, they just wouldn't sit.
At 0.45" they would sit nicely, but they would sitting already so deep into the flute that you couldn't enjoy most of the coin because it sunk so much into the flute.

I think the cut for the flute is too deep and hides too much of the coin. A thinner and shallower flute would be nice, I'll work some more on that this weekend.

What do you think? How can we make this idea look better?

Thanks,
Mac