10 Years Of Copper Pennies, Save?

Dang Mud.. you are quite something else.
in the 80's my dad ran a small store. there was a metal fabrication plant behind him. we found the drink machine emptied of drinks one Monday morning and it was filled with copper quarter blanks. we reported it to the mill supervisor who had become a regular customer. he said he knew who did it, also a customer. my dad said don't mention it to him, I will handle it. the customer who did it paid for it and did not know it. My dad was a finished hand cut meat cutter and he cut meat and weighed it and wrapped it in white paper the old fashion way and wrote the price on it with the old grease pencils. the customer thought he was special and getting the special high class treatment. ... my dad never wrote the price per pound on it, just the one price. payback .................... with a profit.

In all seriousness, many decades ago I..........uh knew...uh I mean Heard Of a kid who actually did the grind pennies to dime sized for the change machines. After all was said and done, he was making <10% of minimum wage.




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Martin_V3i said:

I have detected and collected coins since 2010, and still have all of them. I do collect zincs but almost never dig the shallow ones, reading zinc ID.

My question is, "Would any of y'all save pounds and pounds of copper pennies, for the day when copper pennies are discontinued, to sell for melt value?" As I understand it, a copper penny at melt, is worth half a cent more than a penny. Last check I made on all of my coin's weight was right at 65lbs, and that was weighed at the end of 2017. Probably have 80 pounds, and more pennies than other coins, of course.

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Large concentrations of coins are HEAVY! I helped a guy move a Coleman cooler full of coins once. You know the size that fits 2 cases of beer cans. We were young then, but my back still hurts every time I think about that. Just the gallon jugs full of coins were heavier than I care to deal with. Keeping coinage like that just makes no sense to me. That's why they made paper money...and checks...and credit cards. No, decades of accumulating pennies in increasingly heavy containers, and torn ligaments at the end of it, just isn't a solid investment strategy. Especially when its not legal to melt them, and may not become legal in your lifetime. Plus, if it does ever become legal, there will a big rush on copper scrapping, and the price will drop quick.

All good advice, thanks! I really just got lazy, plus my credit union charges a percentage, even for rolled coins. Then, there are the fees and concerns with using Coinstar, yet I suppose that I will eventually hit those which offer a fee-free Amazon gift card.

Do you think 60 pounds of pennies will clog a Coinstar! IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING, as Gilda Radner used to say.

Mud-puppy said:

Copper Pennies!

I have myself a small cheap little lathe/mill combo set up...out of China, 110volt, paid $10 for it at a garage sale. Like something a pen maker old retired guy would use shortly before his death and the impending estate sale which is ultimately imminent for all of us...So I got the dmaned thing...took her home and got busy.......

So what I do is, I chuck up those copper pennies into the lathe feature, I carefully machine off the appropriate radius until they are the dimension of a dime...., then, I mill off the surface until they are the corresponding dimes thickness! ..The final product is the exact same size of a dime! then I dump them through the Coinstar for a 9c profit! The Coinstar is like a Tesoro! It cant tell a copper penny from a dime!

I suppose a guy could use a punchpress and a surface grinder to speed up the process, really go into business! But I aint got that kind of money! I do have some nice Bubinga wooden pen blanks that came along with it if anybody is interested in making pens?

I got the 'penny to dime' conversion format down so I can pull $50 just watching TV of an evening!...Self employed and running my little mill making dimes out of pennies!! Minus the Coinstar 12% fees of course..which we can all agree is an abomination!

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for anyone else I would quote this section of US code. It is a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 331 to alter a U.S. or foreign coin with the intent to defraud.

but this is mud puppy so I really don't think it applies in this case.

The pre 1982 cents are not pure copper. They are 95% copper, and the other 5% is tin and zinc. So if selling them, you would not get the full copper price.

It was a long time ago but unless I'm mistaken I think there was a short period of time when banks were buying copper pennies at about 50% over face value.

GKL said:

It was a long time ago but unless I'm mistaken I think there was a short period of time when banks were buying copper pennies at about 50% over face value.

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Wondering what would be their incentive?

amc rulz said:

Wondering what would be their incentive?

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I'm not sure, I tried searching online to see if I could find an old article about it but nothing yet.

Maybe it was back close to after the Zincolns started being made and the government wanted to buy back some of the copper cents due to a shortage of copper back then, that is just a guess as it is a vague memory, but somehow I do vaguely remember for a limited time something like $1.00 worth of copper pennies being bought for about $1.50

There was a penny shortage back then where people were hoarding their pennies and the banks needed them for circulation. The Mint eventually caught up with demand.




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What to do with all these pennies? Well, I've built myself a handgun that shoots Them!! Ya see, Instead of the traditional round bore, My barrel has a horizontal slot, you load a whole role of 50 pennies into the butt just like you would slap in a fresh clip of cartridge ammo......See?...Its propellant is the same as whats used in a Paslode Impulse Nail gun!....A tube of butane gas and a rechargeable battery!....You can flat saw down a house with all those little copper discs flying around like deadly frisbees!

I'd post a picture with more design details but the Govt is considering buying me out...but of course, being the Govt, they want me to make them a prototype that shoots Quarters!...I just cant see wasting all these Quarters doing the R&D when pennies are perfectly fine out to 20yards!...

If you simply Must shoot them, load them in a 10G shotgun shell. Pattern sux tho.




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wasatchau said:

I got the bug to save copper (memorial) pennies, too. Thought I'd save 100 pounds and turn them in to see what they are worth. I doubt that they are worth any premium as copper, but some boy Scout might want to go thru them to start a coin collection. I had 66.6 pounds at the end of last year and hope to finish the pile by early March.That would be four years of detecting. If you cash 'em in, let us know what they were worth per pound. That would be interesting.

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Copper pennies are about 145 to a pound. figure some loss for wear, and you're down to about 142 per pound.

So... 100# of pennies is worth about $142.

It's why I typically just dump them into coinstar as I get them..

KinTN said:

If you simply Must shoot them, load them in a 10G shotgun shell. Pattern sux tho.




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And given that one roll of pennies weigh more than 5 ounces, they kick like a mule.

You cant effectively shoot a stack of pennies out of a shotgun shell! Good Lord! We have all tried! stacked flat, a load of shotgun shell pennies go hither and yon! They fly out all higgeldy piggelty with reckless abandon! You couldnt hit a a pumpkin in a washtub at 5yds with a roll of pennies loaded into a shotgun shell!


If a guy is intent on saving money on down range projectiles, forget using pennies! For a discerning and frugal detectorist, AWA a firearm afficianado with a rudimentary modicum of elementary reload ballistical pressure chamber understanding...

May I suggest utilizing spent AA batts for this purpose? Not all of us are recharge 'Save the Planet' greenies ! Some of us buy the 48 pack of cheap AA alkalines for our rigs to hunt coins! Consequently we have amassed a stockpile of of dead heavy AA slugs waiting to be used for an interesting purpose!


Well, I am here to say, an AA alkaline battery slug has some deadly down range capability! Even out of a Wrist Rocket! 100 yards! I cut them in half and load them into my shotgun shells! Doesnt matter what gauge, 20, 16, 12, 410, what have you...Just a few wraps of electrical tape for a perfect sabot round!!! I'm telling you! Just crimp that mutherhubbard and pull the trigger!

You sure down want to be down barrel when a half a AA comes 'Whoop whoop whooping' through the air!!

Just saying...AA's are heavy dead or alive! A guy could load a 4 pack of spent AA's out of a Bounty Hunter into a worn out Sams Club sock and easily kill a guy! A dangerous guy! Like Whitey Bulger!...I hear he got clubbed with a sock and a Master padlock, but still..you get the idea...

Ballistics! I doubt a hardcore murderer like Whitey Bulger woulda got killed by smacking him over the head with a roll of 50 fussing smuggled into prison butt pennies? In a worn out sock? Digger Please!

Well lets see.... a copper penny contains 2.95 g of copper. There are 453.6 g per pound so that works out to ... 154 pennies to the pound ($1.54).

Copper is currently selling for $2.30 per pound giving you about a 0.76 profit per pound. Figure in all the time, effort and handling you'll put in getting rid of these pennies and that 76 cent profit per pound fades unless your doing it on an industrial scale. I have seen people sell rolls of copper pennies on EBay for $1 per roll but dont know how works out in the long run.

Pfft trade them in for cash and buy silver as has been already suggested. Silver is currently at a low so now's the time to buy anyway.