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Message:: [QUOTE="Burton Strauss III, post: 3612964, member: 59677"]Manufacturing the blanks and planchets is a large industrial process and certainly has errors, which get to the mint, are struck and released. There are acids that preferentially eat copper vs. zinc. It is, therefore, possible to remove the plating and create a faked "unplated" cent. One cent in raw materials, a few cents of acid to process and poof... An expert (I'm not one) can tell, which is why you see $600 certified examples for sale and $12 uncertified examples for sale. If those $12 examples were real, it's worth spending $50 to have it certified and sell for $600... It's possible to plate a copper cent with a variety of metals, chrome, silver, platinum, gold, etc. - the surface will show the plating to an XRF gun, the scale will show copper vs. zinc host. And sure, specific gravity would show different values for solid silver vs. plating. Why bother - it would be obvious from the scale alone. I don't get the rest of the nonsense - at 3.1g it's silver-plated copper cent at 2.5g it's silver-plated zinc/copper cent. Either way, it's damaged and worth 1c. Whether they removed the copperplating on the zinc host to plate it with silver? Who gives a bleep?? Not I. I'm out.[/QUOTE]