I had nothing to do the other day so I decided to play around with heat and coins. I wanted to see if I could tone some fairly new dimes,pennies,nickels, and quarters. The dime and quarter did some interesting color changes and the nickel just turned black:whistle: the penny simply melted into an ugly ball of metal. I thought it was sad that the pennies that are made today are pethetic pieces of zinc that wouldent last in the ground for more than 5 years never mind surviving my oven. (pretty agravating to future metal detectors). So I wondered why the government decided to use zinc instead of other alternatives in 1982. I cant think of a logical reason to use it besides it being cheaper to produce.I think we would have been better off with steel , zinc plated pennies. opinions please:hail:
Dont feel bad for that penny. In high school i used to weld change to my welding table at welding class.You Hit a penny just once with a live welding rod and they turn into a white hot mess. lol You are correct. The reason the government changed the penny like all the other US coin ment to everyday use was its cheaper. Copper like Silver and Gold has a higher bullion value then monitary. This is also another reason they want to get us to stop with moeny all together. In the future people will use plastic credit type cards only. Its a little ways away. But maybe some time before the year 2100 Metal and paper may not be the worlds way to spend. Weird thought ah? I wonder what coins will be worth then? I kinda dont like the idea, but it is the way the world will go. I am talking about future here most likely beyond everyone here today reading this life span's. How dull would life be when you at the store and you grab a drink from a robot and you can look into you hand to see if you got something worth holding on to. Id also like to add. If this is something that does happen future, then screw the future. Now how do you like that for a board mans thoughts?
Somewhere in the archives here I mentioned the results of taking a dime, nickel, quarter, statehood wuarter and cent and letting them roast in various means in my fireplace. I'll tell u, the dime became a lovley shade of violet after heating, ice water and reheating.
Try heating coins that have been dipped in dish soap. However, remember different dish soaps have different formulae so your results may vary from mine. I came out with some really nicely toned blue colorations to clad coins. Now for something to try, get some gun blueing solutions and try them on coins. If your really interested in wasting time and coins, try different acids. Sulfurus or Sulfuric acid will make a nice blue substance with most cents prior to 82. If filtered and left to slowly evaporate, you get a really fantastic blue crystal. If you want to stick to heating only, place the coins in a metal pot, add water, salt, sugar, beets and venigar. Now heet this and watch what happens.
This sounds like David Lettermans stupid human tricks....I always ask how did they discover that "talent" So how did you come up with this combination of boiling the coins
My understanding is that the choice of zinc as the main metal in the cents was because the major zinc producer had a senator in his pocket.
Just many, many years of experimentation on many things. I was a chem major, taught chem for a while and just love to experiment. Coins all have a consistant metalurgical property so trying different experiments with coins you always know that any differences in reactions are due to the other substance you put into contact with the coin. As to boiling a coin, that only seams logical for cleaning so to add different substances while doing it is purely experimental. For removal of just plain dirt, it works well if the water is distilled and the coin is then blown dry with a hair dryer.
Cleaning out a fraternity house once, I gathered up bunches of change left behind. Of course they were filthy, sticky, nasty... so I put them in a plastic container with diluted Simple Green to dissolve away the gunk so I could wrap them up and cash them in. Well, I forgot about them for about a week. When I saw them, I poured off the liquid and everything looked fine until I turned them over. The sides of the coins that were laying against the plastic bottom of the container had turned incredible colors from near black to rainbow. I kept one of the dimes and put the rest into circulation hoping that people will get a kick out of them when they find them.
The mint needed an inexpensive metal that was readily available and cheaper than copper. There aren't too many choices. Steel, Zinc, Tin, or Aluminum or copperalloyed with one of them. A copper alloy would only briefly delay yet another change. Tin would workbut I don't believe it's cost was that much less, (I'm also not sure but it may not be avalable from domestic sources in large quantity. Aluminum was cheap, fairly corrosion resistant, but it was much lighter than the current cent and it would have been too noticable. They wanted the new composition to be as unnoticable as possible. that left zinc or steel. Steel tends to be even more reactive and it spalls as it corrodes. Not to mention that it's magnetic properties would also tend to make it noticable. This kind of left zinc by default.
