I was sifting through my foreign coins, and I discovered a 1947 silver 1 Krona with Gustaf V, which made me wonder. How much does that happen? All my world coins (aside from the Canadian and odd Bahamian coin from change) came from a dealers bulk foreign pile. Also, does anyone know the melt value of the coin I discovered? I'm going to leave it in my hoard, I'm just curious.
Melt probably isn't that much. I occasionally find silver in dealer junk boxes. However, I've seen dealers at shows that specifically have a junk world-silver box. Everything for melt, basically. It's generally a good deal, and you can find a lot of neat stuff in those boxes.
I was looking in a box of junk world coins at a dealer and had a hard time picking out any silver. Is there an easy way of decifering between silver and nickel?
Very different colour. When worn, silver always tones pleasantly if it has not been tampered with, and feels somewhat heavy in the hand. Nickel tends not to tone, or tarnishs gun metal colour, and is somewhat light.
Cover it with a piece of tissue paper. Silver will appear white and other white metals will appear gray.
I don't know what cupronickel is.. But anyways at my friends store we use a magnet to sort Canadian silver from the non silver and it works fine. The magnet I use at home is from an old high end tweeter I had that blew in one of my custom speaker sets that I built and it works fine too.
Cupronickel or copper-nickel is an alloy of copper and nickel. As Jerome says a great many of the non-silver canadian coins are either pure nickel which is strongly magnetic, or the recent one being nickel plated steel which is also magnetic (The Canadian five cent pieces from 1982 to 92 are cupronickel.). Nickel though when alloyed with as little as 10% loses it's magnetic properties. Under a very strong magnetic field there may still be a slight reaction. (Oddly enough, aluminum also reacts if you have a strong enough magnetic field as well. Although for aluminum it is repelled by the magnetic field.)
