Lately as I am sorting I have been coming across more and more zincolns that seem to be missing their copper layers. They look like the old zinc plated steel pennies from 1943. I assume someone is doing this by electrolysis. Has anyone here experimented with this? I got to imagining someone mining the copper from zincolns before returning them to circulation. Obviously this would not be worthwhile as the yield would only be about a third of a pound of copper from each $25 box. Now if some of your real copper pennies were to fall into the electrolite would that be a violation of the mint's ban on melting? You technically wouldn't be melting the cents.. just mining a little copper off them. In the olden days folks used to clip or file small bits of metal from the silver and gold coins that passed through their hands. They would build up a little pile and melt it down. The government tended to frown on this practice and instituted harsh penalties. I seem to recall reading somewhere that clipping coins was punishable by death. And back in those days of swift justice a death penalty did not mean 20 years of 3 squares a day while you exhausted your appeals. They solved this problem by improving the coin designs to make them round with detail out to the edges and also by reeding the edges.
I have not run across any of these, I have found numerous zincs that appear that they were in a clothes dryer for some time where the copper was worn off on the high spots. I have heard of just plain error coins that are just the zinc slug with no copper electroplating on them. I would like to see a pic of one if you have a way to do so. The Mint melt ban also bans "treatment" of coins. This I'm sure is open for interpretation. I have a copy of the official mint ruling as issued in Dec 2006. I can post it here for comments if you would like. Ryedale
At first I got all excited thinking maybe I had found an error coin like you mentioned. But close examination under high magnification showed a bare trace of copper remaining. They did a pretty good job. Maybe they were trying to make a coin they could sell off as an error. The scanner is on the blink right now, but I will try to take a picture with the digital camera in the next few days. I was pretty sure they wouldn't allow me to convert copper cents this way. No need to post the mint ruling. Though it might be interesting if anyone can get a record of all the public comments that were made and how the government responded to them when they decided to do whatever they wanted to do anyway. I am taking their message to heart. They said we need to not melt or export pennies and nickels to "preserve the coinage" and I am doing my patriotic duty by preserving a couple of tons of coinage in my back room <G>
I consider it my duty to hide coins so that no one melts them.
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Mining Copper from Zincolns
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Posted - 03/03/2007 : 23:18:14
