http://www.coinworld.com/articles/1974-bronze-clad-steel-cent/ The possessor of the coin had been an employee at a Pennsylvania steel mill in 1974 when U.S. Mint officials brought bags of the bronze-clad steel cents to be destroyed in the mill’s furnaces. According to the employee’s account, a bag broke open and Mint officials failed to recover all of the pieces. The employee reported that five to eight cents were kept by workers.
There is a small paragraph alluding to this in the Redbook. See also aluminum cents the same year and the i think 11 more they made in 1975. Very interesting stuff. Also illegal to own...
Why would they quit making these, and scrap the idea all together? You would think that bronze-clad steel cents would work better and be cheaper than the copper-plated zinc cents we use now. Or at least, back then, it would have probably been cheaper than pure copper or bronze. :rollling:
The bronze clad steel was probably harder in the dies and when the cost of copper dropped again there was no need to make the change so they scrapped the idea. Only to go through the whole testing process again eight years later when copper went up again. The zinc cents were probably adopted rather than steel on the die life question. Today the zinc is costly enough that they need a cheaper material. Steel is cheaper, but it really doesn't matter because nothing is cheap enough to return cents to profitability.
What if they made them out of the same stuff that the old OPA's were made of.. we could then have purdy red and blue cents!
Might work, but it is a totally different type of equipment than what the Mint uses. I have no way of estimating what the cost of production would be. It's almost more a printing process than a minting process. The OPA tokens were produced by running sheets of the fiberboard through a set of rollers that impressed the design multiple times into the sheet and then the tokens were punched out of the sheet.
