..............is a penny and a half earned?? With the recent price movements in silver and gold, I haven't been paying much attention to Copper. (Maybe I should have) I was surprised to see the spot price for copper at $2.40/pound when I last checked. If my calculations are correct, at current spot, each pre-1982 Lincoln cent is worth approximately $0.156. (That's $0.78 for each $0.50 roll). I wonder if its time to start pulling all those Lincolns out of my pickle jar.:goofer:
thats what I started doing about a month ago. been going through about $25 a week. The hard part is going to be finding a place to store all those pennies after several months of roll searching.
I thought it was further back than that that they were moslty copper??? I thought it was like 72 or 73... Hmmm, Anyway, how many does it take to make a pound? I wonder if you can actually trade them in as copper???
All before 1982 (except 43) were made of 95% copper. The number per pound is about: 1lb = 453.59237 grams........453.59237g/3.11g = 145, give or take, pre-1982 cents per pound.
who are you going to sell them to, my coin dealer will not buy them? He will buy silver but not copper where do you go then?
If your local junk dealer won't take them (although you'll probably need a significant weight amount - 2 or 3 pounds won't do), he should at least be able to tell you who will.
There are many recycle plants around. Check out thier locations via the net with such search places as Google or Yahoo company search. In and around large cities they even have metal recycle companies. They will gladly take your pre 1982 pennies or any copper coins. If they are the usual slightly intellegent people I have incountered, they will really appreciate the utter stupidity of coins worth the usual bulk rate of .02 or .03 at most coin shows or on ebay being sold by the pound for less than that.
On the copper cents, watch the scrap/meltdown angle. Around 5 or 6 years ago we had a local scrap dealer busted for melting down copper cents with the scrap copper wire he bought. (He actually cast his own 20 pound ingots.) Turned out that the feds took a very dim view of melting down currently circulating coinage. I never found out what actually happened to him, the business was sold to pay his legal expenses I believe. But I always wondered how they could go after him for melting down pennies when so many thousands of people have melted down silver coins every time spot gets ridiculously high.
Interesting observation. Does anyone know if similar prosecutions occured in the late '70s - early '80s, when the price of silver was very high and people were melting it?
I wasn't aware of any law against melting coins. But given the state of the copper market, I've started to save the pre-82s. It doesn't matter if there is a way to dispose of them now. The marketplace will figure out a way eventually.
I also hoard copper (pre-1982) cents. A great site to show you how much the copper is worth in a cent updated regularly is http://www.coinflation.com. It also lists the metal content of all circulating US coins. Interesting site. According to coinflation.com, each copper cent currently has 1.64 cents worth of copper in it. As far as I know, copper prices are not high enough yet to make the melting of them profitable, and I don't know anyone who is paying above face for the copper cents yet...that's a big 'yet' in my opinion, I really think that day will come. I put up a small site/article about my own penny hoarding, methods and reasoning, and it can be found at the link in my signature. If you check out the 'articles' on that site I broke down the contents of several $25 boxes of cents, listing the amount of wheaties, pre-1982's, Canadians, and newer zinc coins.
cent rolls I recently bought $40 in cent rolls at the bank to look through. (Note: they're "Cents", not "Pennies"). I found that about 10% were the pre-'82 type. I also found about 50 Wheat cents including 1937, 1937-D, 1930, 1925-S, 1919, and 1919-D :smile
Daniel, I guess my results were a little better than yours with the pre-1982 cents(not wheats though!). I only got 8 rolls yesterday and was able to fill up three complete rolls of pre-1982 cents with a few left over. Nice finds on the wheats! Bill
SeatedLib... That was some great info on your site regarding copper pennies. I'm curious to see how the price of wheaties will react when and if 1959-1982 cents start being exchanged for bullion content. (I personally can't see them being valued at the same price)
Thanks. I think the wheaties will always have some numismatic value above copper content, unless of course copper goes way through the roof. Then they might start getting used as bullion anyway. I would hate to see that, especially if melting is involved. I love wheat cents, and only wish I was still allowed to own them. My wife collects them, and any I get she takes away from me. She has sets in whitman's folders that she collects and upgrades, but all the doubles...thousands of doubles...go into her huge wheat cent jar. I would estimate that she has about 7,000 wheat cents in that jar. She won't let me have any wheat cents at all, lol, I tried to hide some from her sort of as a joke in my dresser drawer, but she found them and dumped them in to her jar. She says all the wheaties belong to her, so I just have to deal with it...
Tell her that since you are married, everything is community property and therefore split down the middle 50/50. So, 3500 of those wheaties are yours. If that doesn't work, then wait until she leaves then take a couple handfulls at a time and put them into your own hidden stash. She'll never miss them!!
I worked up the metal value of all the circulated US coins. The prices I found this morning are: Copper $2.62lbs, Nickel $7.57lbs, zinc $1.29lbs. Copper cent = $.0197 Zinc cent = $.007 5 cent nickel = $.042 Dime-clad = $.015 Quarter-clad = $.038 Half dollar-clad = $.076 Sacagawea dollar = $.064
