When Will Copper Be Legal To Melt?

Boris, sounds like you are volunteering...give it a stab!

harrison2,

I think I would rather someone set an example for me first and get caught. Then I know what not to do.

- Boris

I have to agree. I believe I have said this once or twice before.

And what, pray tell, would he do with 35# uglybars of .950 copper? Joe Pubic won't believe him, and anyone capable of refining it to .999 will immediately recognize it as melted cents.

Granted the mom and pop neighborhood scrap dealer may not be very sophisticated (though even they are gonna question a homemade bar), but the pros know exactly what they're doing. They even sort steel into dozens of alloys, to take advantage of certain markets.

You may think it's a big deal to take a pickup truck full of aluminum cans in for recycling. I saw an ad for a major aluminum buyer, promising they can have your check cut in five minutes from the time you drive a 60' semi trailer on to their scales. They just strap the whole thing down, open the rear doors, and lift truck and all, like a giant dump truck.

There is the possibility that like the vast majority of the public they thought it was illegal to deface US coins even though it wasn't.

Here in Canada, I was laughed out of my local metal recycler's office for asking if they'd take a few hundred pounds of cents.

(Aside: See, even Canada is more sensible than Chicagostan! )

A year or so later, a coin dealer offered me a reasonable price and I agreed (he liked the idea of hoarding copper).

We don't have to physically melt our silver coins to obtain melt value for it. Even though I don't collect tea pots, I'd certainly buy a .999 silver teapot if the price were right! So when enough people catch on, long into the future, the same may be true of copper. And anyway, all you really need is 1 buyer to know what it's worth.

We dont actually need to worry about the illegal issue of melting pennies.
I believe that 99.9% people here are coin collectors. Who has a melting facility?
Keep your copper cents in their original shape, their bullion value will always be there, and there might be some additional numismatic values. Once melted, all the rare varieties will be gone. you are losing money potentially.
Besides, someone mentioned here before that he found 23% of the pennies in circulation to be copper. What I have found is lower, around 15% to 17%. Maybe there is some difference from place to place. I am in southwestern, by the way.

If it is illegal to use the metal in the coins, then why even make them out of metal? If the metal in the coin has no value to the holder of the coin, then why not just make them out of something non-valuable like fiberglass or something? I thought the reason coins were made out of metal was so they would have some real value, but not being able to use that metal for it's metal value seems to defeat the purpose.
Just a thought.