How come every other country I have seen mints their cupronickel coins as alloyed metal, yet the US uses a "sandwich". Is their any reason why the US is the only country that I have seen that mints their dime and large coins like this?
Can't say why it is the only country, but the reason it is a sandwich was to match the electrical resistance (?) of silver so that when they were passed through a vending machine it would register the same and the companies wouldn't have to replace or modify the machines. Probably because most other countries don't have lobbyists for vending machines and they just changed it anyways, but that would just be a guess.
The United States of America is an affluent and wealthy country and we can (supposedly) afford to hang on to old outdated coinage ideas! Why else would we be the last to adopt a dollar coin ?
I believe the clad Panama coins were minted in the US using the same planchets as the US dime and quarter.
That is the official line but probably not accurate considering vending machines coin mechanisms back then were strictly mechanical and didn't check electromagnetic properties of the coins. Also if that was the case then today's vending machines wouldn't be rejecting silver. In fact the machines back then DID have difficulties accepting both types because of the weight difference. (I also don't believe they have the same electromagnetic signatures because that is what allows a discriminating metal detector to tell the difference between a clad quarter and a silver one.) What we were really wanting was a composition that was counterfeit resistant. The clad composition was very difficult to produce and it was thought to be a built in anti-counterfeiting feature. Most countries switched from silver to coppernickel decades before we did during a time when it was much more important to maintain the appearence that the coinage was not being debased and the solid coppernickel didn't stick the change right in their face. (Especially for those countries that had originally done a debasement first to 500 fine and then later to complete elimination.)
