I got 30 rolls that was given to me, very nice of him to do so! Gone about half way not really any thing special a couple of cents that were in the teens in 20s that filled a couple holes in the book.Here are a few errors Nothing major but still fun. Half a digit missing Incomplete planchet Defective Planchet
Oh that last one is a keeper. Very nice. You know they claimed the 44-46 were made with spent shell casings. (From US gun ranges?) But there is no evidence of this and the mixture of metals would be different. But there are slots in the albums for shell case cents.
I have read that story a hundred times from various sources. So there is no sound foundation to that?
Yeah I always believed the shell case cents story, but some time ago there was a very knowledgeable member here who explained there is no evidence at all that the spent shell casings were melted down and used to make pennies. The time it would take to collect these things, and melt them down, and there wouldn't be enough to make a fraction of the coins that were minted and the composition of the 1944-1946 is exactly the same as the other cents. Not all bullets are created equally and there would be all kinds of metals in these coins, and there aren't. It's just a myth that has been accepted as truth. The reason I believed it, I always felt these coins toned differently. Billions of bullets would have to have been fired at US gun ranges and the number was probably only in the millions.
What I read and what I believe is that of course the larger stationary weapons shells were collected and sent back to the US. It would be ridiculous to have a ship return empty or partially. The shells were then melted and somewhat refined. The cent that @Cazador posted looks like a fissure. this happens when the metals did not mix. What I have also read is that the shell casing is what made all the crazy streaks of Yellow metals on red examples. Edit: The shell mix was then added to the standard copper mix and then poured into the ingots.
At first I heard the theory about shells from the battlefield, but there's no record of that and then they said US domestic gun ranges. You can't just pick up shells because some of them are still live. I doubt the ships returned empty. They were always carrying soldiers back and forth.
There may have been a bit more zinc or tin in them at the time, since they tend to tone differently than some others. I can compare a graded 1945-S to a 1939-S or a 55-S, and while they are all red color, the 45-S, being the finest of the 3, has hints of a rose gold tone to it. I also have a 46-S (ungraded) with this tactic, among many other BU cents I have that don't. I do believe that, with the shell case story, there is one thing to strike it down. A lot of those shell cases probably weren't recovered, and who knows what was done with the ones that were. Plus, 1944 (one of the 'shell case' years) was the peak mintage year for cents, with Philadelphia alone minting 1,435,400,000 of them. The shell case story is one of them also believed by a lot of non-coin collectors since many of these popular TV and mail order advertisers run away with it and find it a reason to charge you $9.95 a coin, plus the box, or in other words $100 for about 30-50 cents in value. Or you can find 30-50 cents in value for 9 cents coin roll hunting.
