Realcent.org

Nice old thread...showing what we were looking for but hasn't happened...copper is over 3$ @ 3.0876 and the Cu cent is worth $0.0206473 but the selling of them is terrible and many have either sold for nearly melt, cant sell them or have returned to the bank. I haven't sorted Cu cents from Zn cents in 3 years. Although just last week I did order a few boxes of cents. I am going to rebuild my raw cent stores.

Look at this old thread...viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19072&hilit=mining

We were at over 80,000lbs annual mining output of copper!

fasteddy wrote:Nice old thread...showing what we were looking for but hasn't happened...copper is over 3$ @ 3.0876 and the Cu cent is worth $0.0206473 but the selling of them is terrible and many have either sold for nearly melt, cant sell them or have returned to the bank. I haven't sorted Cu cents from Zn cents in 3 years. Although just last week I did order a few boxes of cents. I am going to rebuild my raw cent stores.

As I've repeated in other threads, I realized that I couldn't support the long term storage of a couple of tons of cents so I went through them all by hand over a period of a year or more and pulled out all the near MS coins and wheats, and segregated all the other higher quality coins (which ended up being about one third of what I had) and took the rest of the dirty coppers back to TD bank (just in time to get most counted before the counters went down). Still ended up with about 1500 face of high quality clean LMCs - and I'm keeping those as bagged, for good. I still save clean coppers as I find them in change but that is blessed few - most I find are nasty.

Funny how things often work out differently than we expect. I can see the percent of copper Lincolns actually going up somewhat, not down, for two reasons:

1) More people with copper are dying and heirs don't want to spend a lot of time disposing of items with little value. Think about the late HCBTT (Hoard Copper by the Ton) and of course that dealer in Indiana who had a HUGE bunch of wheats to get rid of about 1-2 years ago on this site; and

2) People who have had copper for years are getting fed up with not being able to get much for it. Several even on this site have talked about taking coins back to the bank. I bought about $520 in copper a few years ago for face value with and picked it up locally.

I still see people dumping coffee cans made of steel at the coin counters....their comments are like....Can you believe that someone would save all these pennies? My spouses Father had all these in the garage or a similar statement... As I am preparing to purchase the bags that those pennies just dropped into.

IMHO there are a whole lot more people in situations like this versus returning their Cu cent hoard to the banks.

Cu pennies will be in circulation as long as the cent is.

Yes while the % of copper cents made to zinc cents made goes down every year as more and more zincs are minted. Cents are thrown away, some are lost and some are found. Zinc cents don't last as long in the environment due to corrosion and are removed from the system. And as stated as our older generation passes away, more "worthless" stacks of cents will be deposited at face value. Most likely for a fee charged at a coinstar! I agree they will always be able to be found as long as we still use the cent!

I bought some penny rolls at the bank last week, and one of the rolls was almost all 1975 D. The entire roll was brass from the 1970s. So there are definitely some strange deposits being made. I've also had boxes that had much higher than average Canadian or wheat penny numbers.

There is a possibility that a global copper shortage occurs in the next 10 years which could drive up the price of copper to the point that people actually would grab all of the brass in circulation. Higher rates of inflation are also possible.

I'm of the opinion that American brass pennies are an incredibly good store of value if purchased at face value. I think the same is true of non-steel Canadian nickels. If base metal price trends continue, it won't be long before American nickels are a decent store of value as well.