Wartime nickles

Yes it does have silver in it but there are some of the wartime nickels that have a different composition and will ring up differently. I too have some of these.

tomme boy said:

I found a wartime nickle a few weeks back ... It rang as a 56 on my VDI on my Minuteman. It has the P above the dome so it should be a Silver right???? BTW it was a 1945 P.

If it has the 35% silver shouldn't it ring higher?

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No, it won't because the other alloy mixes degrade the conductivity compared to our US 'silver' coins. The US 'War Nickels' were made of a mix of 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese. They needed the 'nickel' metal for the war effort and changed up the mixture. The end result is a coin that usually has a numeric VDI read-out just slightly higher than a 'normal' US 5¢ coin.

Naturally the visual response can vary a little based on the coin's wear-and-tear and especially on the specific detector model. Many will register all Nickels, of both compositions, with a similar TID.

tomme boy said:

The only other silvers I have right now are quarters and they come in at 91.

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Most of the US 'silver' coins contain 90% silver with some of the much earlier varieties having 89.24%. Due to the much higher conductivity of a majority of those coin's metal make-up they will produce a VDI read-out farther up-scale than the lower-conductive 5¢ coins.

Monte

War nickels have always bounced around as far as VDI numbers go, but they have a nice solid mid tone sound.

OK thanks. It was a solid 56 on my machine. And it was only 2" down up against a sidewalk. It was a old sidewalk. I can tell as it was a river rock stone mix if you know what I mean. That is what I like to look for around older houses.

I've found quite a few Wartime nickels and they ALL rang up the same as a regular nickel.

tomme boy said:

I found a wartime nickle a few weeks back and did not really pay much attention to it as it rang up as a regular nickle. It rang as a 56 on my VDI on my Minuteman. It has the P above the dome so it should be a Silver right???? BTW it was a 1945 P.

If it has the 35% silver shouldn't it ring higher? The only other silvers I have right now are quarters and they come in at 91. All my other silver is at the bank in a safe deposit box from what I collected as a kid. So I can not compare anything else.

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Coin silver is 90% silver, 10% copper. Silver and copper are the two most conductive metallic elements. Silver is more conductive than copper. The Alloy is less conductive then its individual components. There are other factors that are taken into consideration when a detector determines the VDI of a target - namely surface area and thickness. Quarters have a larger surface area than a nickel, and the quarter alloy is more conductive than the war nickel alloy (56% copper, 35% silver, 9% manganese)

For the war nickels, that nine percent really drops the overall conductivity (and with it, the VDI). The alloy for war nickles were designed in such a way it would be identical to the standard 75% copper/25% nickel alloy so the war nickels would work in vending machines. If the two alloys were not electomagnetically similar, the new nickels would be rejected by the vending machines (yes, this was a real concern).

Regardless of the individual conductivities of the metals used in an alloy, the overall conductivity of the alloy is not a weighted average of conductivites of its components. For example, that is why gold jewelry is all over the place of the VDI scale. There are so many ways that gold is debased. 14k gold is always ~58.3% gold. What the remining 42.7% is will have a dramatic effect on the conductivity of the alloy.