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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Collector1966, post: 1076715, member: 17919&quot;]My guess is regarding the pennies, the new zinc ones look like the old copper ones, and there are a lot of folks who still think the penny is made out of copper, so the rationale for a ban might be that if these people heard that the copper cents can be melted legally at a profit, they might take as many pennies out of circulation as they could, regardless of whether they were copper or zinc. Sounds silly, but I think that&#039;s the rationale.</p><p><br /></p><p>With nickels, they all have the same composition (with the exception of war nickels), and the theory holds that John and Jane Q. Public would take a huge amount of nickels out of circulation if they knew (or believed) the nickels could be melted at a profit. My calculations for nickels indicate that their total intrinsic value is a little more than their face value-- </p><p><br /></p><p>$11.22 per pound (current nickel metal price) divided by 454 (number of grams in a pound) = 2.47 cents per gram. The nickel 5-cent coins weigh 5 grams each and are 25% nickel metal, so the nickel metal weight is 1.25 grams each. Multiply that by 2.47 cents and you have a nickel coin containing 3 cents worth of nickel metal. </p><p><br /></p><p>However, 3/4 of the weight of the nickel (that is, 3.75 grams) is copper, and copper is currently $4.36 per pound, or about 0.9 cents per gram. Multiply that by 3.75 grams and you get roughly 3.4 cents worth of copper per nickel.</p><p><br /></p><p>So the intrinsic value of the nickel metal (3 cents) plus the copper metal (3.4 cents) exceeds the face value of the 5-cent piece, at today&#039;s prices.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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