Coin show vendor said US coins being melted...

I was at the local clubs show yesterday and a vendor mentioned that people are melting Franklins "by the thousands" --- I'm a newb but I didn't think this was legal...

 

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Perfectly legal. The only coins you can't currently melt are copper cents and Nickels. I'm not sure how widespread the melting of silver coins is though.

 

why not copper?

 

why would they bother when they can simply melt pure silver shot? what's the point?
It's already a recognizable coin/round.

 

Franklin half dollars would have to be in an extremely low grade to be sent to the smelter. Many collectors like a nice worn coin and if it's not too bad you can usually get $15 to $20 each in a very low grade. So why would someone send it to the smelter for less than the spot price today of $13.11. As far as I know the smelter bucket is only used for really messed up coins, and there is simply too many good looking worn Franklin halves to have to send them to the smelter. Ppl say all kinds of stuff but usually it's a marketing ploy and it's leading you to what they're selling. :thumb:

 

I agree. We always hear these stories about how all the old US silver coins are being melted. Seems everyone hears it, but no one ever knows of anybody who actually does it; excpet for the culls as you mentioned.

 

Many 95% copper cents are still in circulation as are the five cent coins. Silver is no longer in active circulation.

 

Nickels and pennies are illegal to melt because there was an act passed specifically forbidding the destruction of those coins for melt purposes. The law does not exclude war nickels, so I don't believe it's only because they're made of copper.

 

It was a regulation, not a law, that the Treasury promulgated last year. It's mostly toothless, and designed simply to prevent the creation of an overt trade in melting current coins - especially nickles - to the extant that doing so "threatens the currency".

The Mint devotes most of its efforts to making cents and nickles, and would find it quite frustrating to have to make even more of them to counter them being melted in large numbers.

 

can a guy in his garage derive pure silver out of a 90% coin?

 

if he knows how. do you know how?


what would be the point of doing it if the silver is already in a recognizable coin/round?

 

I would venture to say you could probably find the answer in great detail on GOOGLE.

 

You'd need to do it if you want to use the silver for a chemical or industrial process. Say, if you want to express your independence and self-sufficiency by making your own photographic film. Or, my personal favorite, silvering your own telescope mirror!

 

Ah, the maintenance required. Silver tarnishes.

 

I was involved back in the 80's when the Hunt bros did their thing. Yes a boatload of coins were melted.. Today.. yes coins are being sent to the smelters and being melted, I know of one dealer in Winchester WV that takes bags and bags of them every week to a smelter. Also know of a dealer here in Mi that does the same thing. To answer you question.. yes, they are in fact being melted. And for clarification, neither of these dealers go through the bags, their reasoning is that they buy from dealers who HAVE gone through and cherrypicked the better stuff.

 

what is the reason they are smelted?

 

Because there ARE so many of them. Sure many collectors like the nice worn coin, but there are MANY MANY MANY more "nice worn coins" than there are collectors. So the dealers have the choice of sitting on the coins for a long long time with their money tied up hoping for that extra little bit per coin (and losing money in the meantime on their tied up capital) or sell it to the smelter at a small profit and keep their money turning. (And what happens if silver drops? Now they won't get that $15 per coin and they won't even get the $13.11 the smelter would have paid. It makes more sense to take what you can get rather than gamble on hopefully future profits.) Yes they can bundle the coins into bulk silver lots to sell as a commodity to investors, but the refiners need material for thier operations too and they can also buy those commodity bags as well.

Actually the regulation does exempt the warnickels. I didn't think it did at first but it does.

Yes.

 

oh really? what would be the search term for finding the point of melting the coins?