Hey everybody this post is to show how easily we can all be fooled by posters looking for notoriety on the site. A poster posted a war nickel that was “magnetic” and showed pictures of it being “picked up” by a common mechanics pick up magnet. The posters photos showed only a top shot of the nickel being picked up. I just read the “Magnetic nickel” post today because I found it preposterous to even think a war nickel could be magnetic. But read the post I did and after some thinking I came up with a reasonable hypothesis for the “magnetic” nickel trick. Either double sided tape or the following as shown in my photos that where easily staged. The quarter is for reference, you can see it picks up both with no problems. (I used a 2005 nickel in my tests) Reed.
Or you could, you know, put some double-sided tape on the magnet. Shouldn't we be spending less time figuring out how new posters might be trying to deceive us, and more time figuring out how what they're describing might be possible? I still don't think we'd dismissed the "drill out and insert a steel wire" possibility for the previous coin. I've seen plenty of trolls come and go here. The "magnetic war nickel" poster didn't follow any of the standard trolling patterns (rejecting reasonable suggestions, "I'm going to send this right off to PCGS and show you all", "yes but what if a planchet for this obscure foreign coin somehow slipped into a US mint production run", etc.) -- and yet, it looks like we've run her off. I don't think this was one of the forum's better moments.
Pictures can be deceiving. I'm not sure if this one was intentional or not. I actually did one like this a few years back. Not as a 'troll', but as an April Fools prank. Check this: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/what-is-off-with-penny-front-and-back.293913/
Your probably right and this poster will be pissed that I refuted her but I still find it preposterous to think this nickel is anything other that a standard nickel shown with an easy to explain reason why it was picked up with a magnet. I mean it literally took me less than ten minutes to stage, photo and post this “trick”. Also we haven’t seen ANY other photos of this magic nickel from the poster to show the third side as was asked by a member. Nor have we seen the bottom side while being picked up. Although the bottom side photo wouldn’t rule out the use of double sided tape. Photos are alway required when evaluating a tough coin and until we see more from the poster I still say my hypothesis stands. I’ll be the first one to say I’m sorry if I’m wrong. Reed