Exchanging 40% silver for 90%

Bman, you have ones of us out here who are dumb as nuts...."As far as the OP's question"....what is OP's???? Is it old people, opposite person, operators pole, WHAT??? Is it so dirty that it can not be spelled out on this forum?

 

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Original post

 

I got $176 dollars for 4 tubes of 40%. That's 80 coins. The Vaders were $420 for 20 of them. Note, the Vaders come in tubes of 25 from the New Zealand Mint for Nuihe.

 

Original Poster, the guy who started this thread.

 

Means Old Peculiar which our loving way of saying original poster.

 

Silver is way down. Melt on 40's is 2.38.
If you got 2.20 you made out like a bandit.

 

I got $2.20 when spot was around $16.70

 

Save until spot goes up.

 

That's still insane. Silver content would still have been only $2.47 on a freshly minted coin.

Again, the outer layer is 80% silver and the inner core is 21% silver.

If you're dealing with VF or less coinage, you're losing silver at a rate of ~2.25x the expected loss, due to the differences in density and relative volume of a cylinder inside another cylinder.

So, if a coin has lost 1g in mass, rather than losing merely 0.4g of silver, you may have lost closer to 0.9g of silver. In other words, a 10.5g coin (loss 1g) would have the equivalent silver of a 9.25g coin (loss 2.25g)... or a 19.5% loss in silver value/weight.

So, if you were dealing with VF or lower grade coinage, you were getting $2.20 per coin containing about $1.99 of costly to recover silver.

 

If you've lost 1g of weight from a half, you've likely worn it down to AG. How many AG Kennedys have you seen?

I'll try to remember to haul out the scale and weigh some of my remaining Kennedys. I'm guessing I'll be hard-pressed to find any that have lost as much as a tenth of a gram (1%).

I also don't think "nested cylinder" is the right model for a clad coin. It's a sandwich. And to the extent that weight loss from rim wear is significant, it's wearing away the 21%-silver core more than the 80%-silver cladding, because the core constitutes more of the exposed rim than the cladding layers.

 

So today, melt on 40% is 2.37 per half or 47.50 per roll of 20. 4 rolls is $189.60. So your 176 is 92.8% of melt... That's pretty good for 40%

You bought 20 ounces of silver for $420 or $21/ounce, which works out to a ~$5 premium vs. $16 silver spot.

Are you happy? That's all that matters...

 

Yes, I am happy. The coins I got sell for around $4-$5 over spot due to them being a rarer specialty coin. Darth Vader coins people, you should all be buying them!

 

When exchanging silver for silver you're dealing with ratios and percentages, not spot price. Spot could have an influence on the ratio or percentage but the dealer I have always gives me 90% of melt.

 

You're right about the cladding. For some reason, I had a total brain fart about planchets and metal sheets. You're possibly also right about the wear, though, my reasoning is that the two sides have 80% silver exposed, while the edge is in the ratio of cladding. The obv/rev have the fields protected from wear, for the most part, as do the dips in the reeding.

A bit off topic, but related... do nickels have a nickel plating layer over the cupronickel mixture? I'm mainly wondering because I have a copper colored nickel, and I'm wondering if that's possible due to wear. It's not copper plated, as it's lighter than a standard nickel.

 

No, nickels have uniform composition throughout. In fact, it's exactly the same compound that forms the outer clad layers of dimes, quarters, and halves -- just no copper core in nickels.

I've seen that "copper-colored nickel" effect on many coins, including some dateless Buffaloes that I left in the vinegar too long. Nickel's more chemically active than copper, and I think many corrosion processes leach it out preferentially, leaving the copper behind.

 

Ahh, okay. So it's corroded. Thanks.

What did your mass experiment determine, BTW?

 

So far, it's confirmed with a high level of confidence that I'm absent-minded. I won't get to it any more tonight; maybe tomorrow...

 

One LCS offered me $3.17 (or so) in 90% for every $10 face of 40%. That's pretty good, right?

 

$10 face in 40% is 2.958 ounces.

 

The 90% = $35.85 and the 40%= $47.60