If your plan was to melt older all copper pennies down into ingots for sale you’d never make a profit unless the energy used to melt them was free.
We used to put pennies on the railroad track. If we ever found them flattened I don’t remember it.
Some parts of the track were too bouncy. We’d stick 'em down with a little bit of Elmers. Flattened 'em good.
We tried that a couple of times when I was little. We were never able to find the pennies afterwards, so I have no idea if they got flattened or not.
God, how did I grow up? I played on railroad tracks, climbed trees, waded in skanky creeks. And swam in places I wouldn’t let my dog drink out of. It’s amazing I’m an adult at all.
It may be that these sorts of things are highly desirable on the path to maturity.
We definitely put pennies, and occasionally nickels on railroad tracks - and found them later, nicely flattened. (Never considered doing this with dimes - much too valuable.) We debated whether this might cause the train to derail, and decided it was worth the risk.
Actually it’s not even illegal to deface them, per se.
[Is it illegal to damage or deface coins?
Section 331 of Title 18 of the United States code provides criminal penalties for anyone who “fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the Mints of the United States.” This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the U.S. Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent.](Front page | U.S. Department of the Treasury)
I’m not sure how you’d portray a squashed souvenir penny as anything but what it is, and I’ve seen jewelry made by cutting everything but the rim and the face part of the coin. Since nobody thinks the coin is anything but a souvenir or decoration in those cases, there’s no fraud.
Not directly related to the OP, but to the “defacing” question: WheresGeorge is a site where you can enter bills you’ve found; people who participate frequently mark their bills to get others’ attention. The site itself sold rubber stamps for that purpose for a while, until the government shut that down because the site was using currency for advertisement. You can still buy the stamps elsewhere (I have one).
Here’s what “The Simpsons” had to say about “A World Without Zinc.”
I just listened to a podcast about the penny. At 10:25 there is segment about people who are penny speculators. They go through thousands of pennies looking for pre-1982 pennies and just stockpile them. They are betting that someday the U.S. government will discontinue the penny and either buy them back at a premium or make it legal to melt them down and sell them. This is similar to what Canada did.
Survivor bias. The kids who did those things and died as a result aren’t posting about it on the internet.
That we know of.
Yep, that’s why coin rings are perfectly legal (in America, might be different elsewhere)
Can’t argue with that. But I never knew a kid to die from an accident. I reckon peanut butter & bee stings took out the weak and incautious ones early. But once they got driver’s licenses we lost a few on motorcycles.
I wouldn’t worry until I hear these folks have been arrested for Penny the Goose, made of 120,00 pennies, U S and Canadian.
You waded in skanky creeks, I’ve gotten drunk in Skanki’s Bar*****.
*****To be fair, Skanki is the family’s name and they are very nice people.
You can easily melt Zinc on a stove.
Best done outside as Zinc is flammable and the fumes are highly toxic.
Take it off the heat, and it’ll stay melted long enough to fill a cast.
With a density of 7.14 g/cm^3, it’s good for making counterweight.
Lead is still better at 11.34 g/cm^3
But it’s a lot cheaper to look in your pocket and change jar to find zinc than it is to order Lead at Amazon for $12 a pound.
Zinc sulfur rockets are a thing.
It is now illegal to melt pennies and nickels as of 2007. It is also illegal to export or take out of the country more than $5 worth of pennies or nickles.
I wouldn’t call zinc fumes ‘highly toxic,’ closer to minimally toxic. While I won’t be melting any pennies in the kitchen, it’s not VX or Novichok.
The energy cost itself would be quite small relatively. The cost of a whole set up to do this and the labor would not negligible of course, but profit from melting down old 95% Cu pennies (not new mainly Zn ones, yet) is definitely possible, and right now we’re talking $2.7/lb Copper when it was in the $4’s for several years. Law or no, mainly Cu pennies would have rapidly dropped out of circulation if they hadn’t switched it to mainly Zn. They’d flow out of the country if not melted domestically, no way they’d be able to enforce the export ban if profit was available on large volume. A lot of the stock of pre '82 pennies probably has been melted down. And, assuming constant real commodity prices (never a sure thing but no more reliable estimate) eventually the same will be true of Zn at inexorable 2% inflation.
And of course this is about the profit from melting, not even the loss the US Mint takes v $.01 for producing even Zn pennies (including their processing costs, not just the raw material cost).
Keeping the penny is an example of mindless populism with no left or right tinge. At least I’ve never detected a right-left difference in opinion on this. Most mindless populism has at least some left or right bias to it.