A bit of clarification...
Current U.S. coins are made of the following...
Half-Dollars, Quarters, and Dimes are made of a "sandwich" of Ni-Cu
alloy clad over a solid copper core. This gives the edges of these
coins the distictive "Oreo" cookie look when when viewing the edge.
Total composition of both the alloy and the core combined is 75% Ni, 25%
Cu.
Nickels are a solid piece of a Ni-Cu alloy clad (75% Ni, 25% Cu).
Pennies are a copper plated zinc (97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper).
The Sacagawea (Golden) dollar is a sandwich of Manganese-brass alloy
clad over a solid copper core. Total composition is 88.5% Cu, 6.0% Zn,
3.5% Mn, and 2% Ni.
Alunimum has not been used in US coinage except in 1974 - those pennies
were struck (due to copper prices), but were destroyed and never
circulated. About a dozen made it outside the mint and one of them was
donated to the Smithsonian (for reference, these aluminum cents are
considered illegal and subject to seizure by the U.S. Secret
Service...really!). And many know about the steel cents made during
WWII.
Silver has not been used in U.S. coinage since 1964 when the cost of
silver exceeded the face value of the coin itself.
And if you really want to talk about "hi-power" EM fields, check out
this guy who uses hi-voltage coils to "shrink" coins...
http://www.teslamania.com/
Insane...
73,
- Aaron Hsu, NN6O (ex-KD6DAE)
{nn6o}@arrl.net
{aaron.hsu}@nbcuni.com
No-QRO Int'l #1,000,006
. -..- - .-. .- ".... . .- ...- -.--"
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2006 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [TenTec] re Copper strap
They beat you to it; pennies are now copper plated aluminum...dimes and
quarters are silver plated copper; maybe they'll have to change them to
aluminum too...
Travis
On May 7, 2006, at 1:43 PM, Rob Atkinson, K5UJ wrote:
> It was reported a few weeks ago that the cost of zinc and copper is
high
> enough to make the content of a penny be worth almost more than 1
cent. That
> value is expected to be exceeded this year. When that happens the
mint is
> going to have to rework the coin content.
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