I'm going through a box of nickels and I have noticed I can tell whether a nickel is old or not by its color. Circulated 1940s nickels have an especially distinctive yellowish tone to them. I can spot one even if the coin is reverse up. Does this have something to do with how metals age? Or did the mint use a slightly different mix of metals back then? I occasionally see a 1970s nickel that looks like this but they're mostly pre-1960. I never, ever see a nickel past 1980 that looks like this. This is my first box of nickels and I have noticed how much easier it is to read the dates on nickels than it is on pennies. I don't have to use a magnifying glass.
That was my first thought, but why aren't there more later year coins that look like this? It's possible that these coins have been circulated nonstop since 1938 but it's just as likely that they sat in coin jars for decades effectively taken out of circulation then put back in at a much later date. Newer nickels just don't wear in the same way. I've also noticed that the nickels progressively changed over the years. I don't know the technical term, but it appears that the coins were struck better back in the day and that there is more relief on the older coins. In the '80s the lower quality nickels started being minted. Look at a BU 1938 nickel and a BU 2003 nickel and the difference in quality is striking. What causes this, and what is the technical term?
I have noticed the exact same, I like the aging/wear pattern of the older ones way better than the new ones. I think that it may be caused on the striking, newer ones are more flat than the older ones.
The reason why the relief changed was to give the dies a longer life. The low relief coins were better for the dies.
Ahhh, now you are really treading into my territory. One thing I notice particularly with the 1938 coins is that they had more of a concave design that better protected the design elements in the center of the coin. In 1939, probably due to the difficulty of striking the '38 coins the relief was lowered very slightly and they stuck with that procedure for all the nickels until ca. 1971-2, the exceptions being some that were minted in the San Francisco mint up until 1970. Then reliefs started getting lowered, they toyed with the design a bit in the 1980s, but in 1987 curiously they went back to the concave design that was present on the 1938 coins, but that again was shortlived and only some of the 1988 coins have that. Then again back to gradually lowering reliefs through the 1990s and early 2000s. Then with the change of design following the Lewis and Clark commemoratives they made Jefferson a low relief comic and his home in Monticello an easy to wear off in a few years visage of its former self. Frankly the mint knows that the coins they are cranking out now will not be soldiering on like their late 1930s and early 1940s coins that are holding up remarkably well for having circulated over 70+ years. One the value of the nickel and copper in the coin is high enough that it is not economical to strike them. Then the nickel is a shell of it's former self in terms of spending. The nickel of 1939 bought about what a half dollar buys today.
I guess 1980s was a rather difficult time for various mints and metal market. Silver price shot up to a rocket high 50 USD / oz. This is also the time when copper cents were struck in copper plated zinc. You can only assume that the mints were forced to do everything under the term 'cost reduction'.
