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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Troodon, post: 332586, member: 4626&quot;]You think you&#039;re well educated on coins but there&#039;s always more you can learn... learned a few interesting tidbits I actually hadn&#039;t known before when I toured the Denver Mint yesterday:</p><p><br /></p><p>60% of the coins the Denver Mint mints in a year, are pennies...</p><p><br /></p><p>The main problem with the pennies costing more in materials than they&#039;re face value, is not the rising price of copper, so much as the rising price of zinc!&nbsp; This is especially due to developing countries like China and India demanding more zinc for the use of industry.&nbsp; A penny is currently worth 1.7 cents in material.</p><p><br /></p><p>However a quarter only costs about 5 cents, and a Sacagawea or presidential dollar about 22 cents, so they make up the loss on pennies and nickels that way.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Mint is the only government agency that is completely unfunded by taxpayer money, and the only one that actually runs at a profit.&nbsp; They make most of their profit by selling their minted coinage at face value to the Federal Reserve.&nbsp; They also make quite a bit by selling coins to you and me, the collectors, at premiums above face value (or production cost, in the case of bullion coins).&nbsp; All the &quot;profit&quot; goes into the US Treasury&#039;s general fund.</p><p><br /></p><p>They are phasing in a new mechanism for transporting planchets to the minting machines, and for transferring minted coins to the counting and weighing rooms.&nbsp; Up until now they&#039;ve been using a hopper system, which requires large containers of planchets to be moved to the minting presses to be scooped out by a hopper.&nbsp; They new system will use conveyors to move finished planchets directly to the minting machines (fromn the machines that anneal, upset, clean, and dry the planchets from the blanks) and then use conveyors to shuttle them downstairs to be counted and weighed after striking and inspection.&nbsp; This will be more efficent (won&#039;t need to forklift around huge containers of blanks) and probably will improve the quality slightly as the conveyors are a bit more gentle than the hoppers.&nbsp; They&#039;re already using this for some of their quarters and eventually will be using it for all their coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Not about coins really, but they&#039;re used to be a row of brick houses between the Mint and the State Capitol... they&#039;ve since been torn down and the City and County Building stands where they used to be.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you live reasonably close to either the Denver or Philadelphia Mint, suggest you take a tour!&nbsp; It&#039;s free and you can make reservations right at <a href="http://www.usmint.gov" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.usmint.gov" rel="nofollow">www.usmint.gov</a> .&nbsp; Or you can take your chances with a standby ticket and just show up... during the slower season (winter especially) during the week you have a good chance a getting a spot.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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