Here's a good opportunity that I'm considering: http://bozeman.craigslist.org/for/3781389378.html It's probably $300 worth of pipe fittings for $50. It might even be a little less than melt value. Either way, it sure beats buying 1 oz copper rounds for 10+ times melt value.
Buying copper at melt value is better than some ideas, but still doesn't make sense when you can buy it under melt from the bank.
Copper is 3.29 right now. That means you need 91 pounds to get $300. I'm with you on copper bullion. Seems crazy to spend 100-200 percent premium on dressed-up copper.
I like keeping pre-82 pennies as a way to hoard copper. They are already in an easy form. They are worth 2 cents and can be gotten for one.
Taking it one step further, if you were able to buy for $50, get back $100 on cash-in at the local salvage yard and then hit the bank for $100 worth of copper pennies (I know you'd need a couple sessions probably to CRH and pull it all), you'd end up with about $220 worth of easily stackable/storable copper for your original $50. Then you could sell them by the pound on eBay for 4x the price, and soon enough you've made $1000 on a $50 initial investment. Lather, rinse repeat and you'll be a millionaire in only a few short decades...
They may have a melt value of $.02 but no one will pay you melt value for them. Just this week, I dumped 350 lbs. of sorted copper pennies into a coinstar machine because no one was willing to even pay face value for them. With a law that states it's illegal to melt copper pennies, I had no choice.
I don't know why people don't keep rolls of pre-82 pennies as bullion. I know that right now you can't get 2 cents a piece for them, but you can just hang onto them and see what happens. The value of a penny is doubled, and you have a store of value that isn't as valuable as silver or gold, and that you can store anywhere. I see no downside to hanging onto them. The worst case is putting them in a coinstar at some point and spending the money. The best case is like the wheat pennies which are worth around 10 cents a piece now. Or more...