Hello,
I spent about 3 months restoring and setting up a drop hammer to produce silver dollar sized coins. With the help of some folks on here, and a little bit of cowboy "engineering", I have a machine that produces many coins each day.
Bosleyjr is right on target with the steel choices. I had a set of dies made out of 01 and they are holding up under less than ideal conditions (hard, repeated impacts) quite well. Message me for the manufacturer I used.
In terms of blanks, I would highly recommend Regency Mint. Their service and shipping has been outstanding, and they did a custom run of aluminum blanks for me, and I've had no trouble ordering brass and copper blanks as well.
Regency Mint - Precious Metals & Custom Coins produced by Regency Mint Regency Mint
Once again, message me and I can provide you with an email address for whom I've been working with there. Fantastic folks.
Unless you have a punch press to make these blanks, I would definitely say it's cheaper to order them through a mint wholesaler that has the machine ready to crank those out. They come either burnished or tumbled, and just the time savings alone is worth ordering them. No metal waste, no machine wear and tear, and none of your time eaten up making your own blanks between the punching, tumbling, and finishing.
For the coins I'm making, with the size at 1.5" and the thickness around .102", the ideal depth of engraving would be around .030-.050" but definitely not much more than that. Most times an engraver knows their steels if you can specify what machine you're going to run the dies in. Now they don't always know what depth to engrave to, and that's critical. When the depth of the engraving is too deep, your coins will come out looking like Ruffles potato chips from the amount the metal moves. I am speaking from experience.
230 ton should be more than enough to make some beautiful coins. I am curious to hear about your efforts!
my post for reference:
Double Strike Issue