Pennies from recycled shell casings?

Would it be possible to figure this out if one had a supposed coin?

I have a historical album containing a history of pennies, and one of the slots is filled with a penny that is claimed to be a "1944 shell casing" penny. I will snap a photo of it when I get home.

 

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Not really, even if you melted it down and did analytical testing. Unless there was a particular element in shells not otherwise known in coins, there is no physical way to prove an old shell is in the cent. We know they changed the cent composition, and that is all we know, and all that is provable. If you have a BU example you can see slight color differences from other cents.

You know, I had never read what Doug and others have about the shells never actually being used but it does clear up confusion I had. When I was a kid and first read this, I wondered to myself why the heck they would melt down shell casings for cents when they still needed more shells for the war? I mean, why not send the shell casings back to the foundry that was making shells? Seems a lot more practical. Late 45-46 I could see them using old shells, since we didn't need new ones, but by then shouldn't there had been all of the copper that wasn't needed for shells available?

I remember questioning this logic 35 years ago, but I guess I just bought the story and moved on since I wasn't that interested in them to begin with.

Chris

 

I agree Medora, I think they may have done some token smelting of shell casings - but there really was a serious war going on and I cannot believe there was a lot of concern over recycling metal from battlefields.

 

one source of shell casings people seem to be forgetting about are rounds fired during training. Sure there wasn't as many rounds fired as there were in combat, but with all the troops that had to be trained, there had to be a ton of spent casings.

 

The large main guns (16" ) did not have any solid casings. The much smaller guns, did.

 

My understanding is that the casings that were actually recycled came from domestic training ranges not from combat.

If some of the coin club members I knew when I was younger were to be believe though, someone did forget to tell at least some of the troops that they didn't have to save the casings. At least two of the members of the Louisville Coin Club served in the navy during WWII. They worked with the smaller guns and their job was to take the expended casing and discard it out of the turret and over the side to get it out of the way. In 1944 orders came down to stop discarding them and the save them for recycling. This lasted until shortly after the first combat contact. The hot casings quickly got out of hand and underfoot. Orders or no orders they started going back over the side. This story is from the mouths of two veterans who were there to me. I have no reason to doubt them.

Frankly though the logistics of collecting casings from combat situations and then shipping them back halfway around the world for recycling makes no sense. Recycling casings from training ranges makes a lot more sense. And like I said the recycled casings was most likely a token PR thing.

 

All I know is my uncle brought one back from the Pacific and I have it now - he made it into an ashtray after the war.

 

Bingo!

 

Ok, here's some pics of what I have for the penny history album as I mentioned earlier in the thread. Personally, I don't really care either way if they're from shell casing copper or not, but I'm just showing what I have. It could be all marketing BS for all I know...

 

As far as I know, shell casings have always been made from brass. And as I remember from my days working on foundry equipiment, once its brass, it is very expensive and difficult to make it copper again.

 

You would not refine the brass back into copper. You would just add more pure copper to it to bring the overall composition of the melt back to 95% copper 5% zinc

 

I occasionally buy bags of pennies from my local bank and run them through a ryedale machine to separate the copper cents from the zinc ones and I noticed a lot of wheat cents were showing up in the non copper bucket. No matter how many times I ran them through they were still being rejected because they didn't contain enough copper compared to the cent in the comparator. I took the rejected cents to a friend who owns a cash for gold store and has an electronic gun that can tell you all the metals present in any object. He tested my cents and they contained copper, zinc, tin and even a slight trace of lead. I forgot the % of each metal present but I remember there being a lot less copper present then in other wheat cents which is why my machine rejected it. It made me wonder what they were melting down to make pennies back then for lead to show up. Do you think lead was present in the casings or maybe left over from the slugs themselves? Either way don't put your wheat cents in your mouth!

 

The electronic gun only tests the surface of the coin, not internally. So if they were circulated, it was possible to be from the environment.You would have to grind one side flat to test. Also what date(s) were the cents that were rejected, as there were limited dates ( if you read the whole thread).

 

I wasn't aware the gun only tests the surface. My friend uses it to test jewlery and can quickly determine if something is gold plated instead of being solid gold. Which is why I thought it went beyond the surface of an item. The dates I found to be rejected were 45 46 47 and oddly enough 50.

 

I also forgot to mention a lot of very old wheats were showing up in the non copper pile from early teens and twenties. I didn't have these tested though because I was told the mint wasn't using a very pure copper back then.

 

It was not hype, it was reality. The soldiers and sailors in the front lines did not save the spent casings to be shipped back to the States to be recycled into cents. The source of the spent shell casings came entirely from ammunition used in live fire training on military bases in the continental United States. For decades the Red Book listed shell case cents were struck in 1944 and 1945. Only within the last several years or so has the dates been changed to 1944 to 1946. I would like to know how they came to that conclusion. If cents were indeed struck using shell cases in 1946 then they would have known that way back then and not just recently.

 

Penny's put away for hard TIMES

 

Excellent response and correct info.

For sure there were shellcase cents from 1946, but so far I have only found them from San Francisco mint. In general most of the shellcase cents I've seen have been from SF, though I have a roll of 45-P that are clearly alloyed with shellcases. I have a whole $20 SF Mint bag that show a gorgeous shellcase color!

The brass cases themselves did not create a problem for the alloy, but there are trace amounts of other residues (especially from the primers) that tone beautiful colors and give the coins their special look.

Here's a pic of a 1946-S with typical shellcase toning:

 

Not Penny's.. Pennies
You just revived an old thread