There is some evidence that bronze tablets were used in Roman times. This sounded rather interesting since metal tablets would never wear down, but on the other hand they would be quite heavy. I have made one prototype so far; I decided to cut a design into it to make it lighter without affecting the stability.

Size	6cm x 6cm. This is a lot bigger than the Roman tablets, but I have rather large hands and this size is more comfortable to me.
Thickness	Either 0.9 or 1.1 mm; I won't know until I dig out my micrometer screw or Vernier scale.
Weight	No idea. Haven't weighed it yet. :)
Material	Copper. The Roman tablets were bronze, but I would have had to order rolled bronze sheet specially from the mill, so I rather used the copper sheet I already had.
Time	This tablet took approximately 3 hours to make. The next few will probably be a lot simpler.
Update	After several months of doing nothing more, I finally made 8 tablets with designs and 4 plain ones, most of them in 0.5 mm copper. The plain (ie solid) ones are quite heavy, and even the 0.5 mm tablets with a lot of piercing drag down the warp quite a bit. The tablets also tend flop over to lie on their side (or at least at quite an angle). On the other hand, there is virtually no abrasion on the yarn at all. I've tried acrylic and cotton so far, and want to try silk under quite high tension to see whether it makes a difference to the way the tablets lie.

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