Copper Bullion Rounds

sorry I posted in the wrong forum, was not sure where to ask

Copper is a purely industrial metal, nothing precious about it. The confusion comes when some people are marketing it as a precious metal.

what is the best way to store copper? airtites? 2x2s?

I was the first one to do a copper bullion round in Troy ounces rather than avoirdupois. That was my Copper Country Quincy Mine piece from 2006. In that case I designed the whole coin around a particular copper blank that I had available that was 36 grams. It's almost five grams over, but I put troy oz on it as something of a joke. Copper was setting new price records and I even had somebody honestly tell me that copper was worth more than gold!! They saw it in the paper... Gold was $1500 but copper was $3000! Yeah right... they didn't happen to notice that one was per ounce and one was per ton! Around the same time people were saying copper was the poor man's silver. The whole situation was so funny that I thought to sort of lampoon the idea by making this super-thick overweight coin. Mostly they are for sale in gift shops and such up in the Keweenaw copper district in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the "Copper Country" as it's called locally. But since then apparently the idea caught on, and lots of makers are doing troy ounce coppers, with no thought of it being a joke. To me that makes it even MORE funny!

The Quincy Mine is real, and today is a National Historic Site, you can visit it and tour the surface workings and sometimes I think they even do underground tours from the Vivian Street adit. The old miner on obverse is wearing a soft hat with oil lamp type light... pre-1910 style. It is intended to represent the legendary miner Arne Harjaala, a major character in the Sci-fi adventure novel A SUPERIOR STATE OF AFFAIRS.

If anybody cares about such things, I made a total of 800 of those, plus 40 bimetal "half-breeds" with a sterling silver center. I still have a dozen or so of the solid copper ones and list them on my online store. The half breeds sold out almost instantly.









I designed the inscription on reverse so that you can read it as ONE COPPER by looking at just the large lettering, or by including the small type you can read it as "Contains ONE troy oz COPPER .997 pure"

If anybody knows of an earlier one in troy I'd like to know about it. If not I think this is the very first one.





Tom Maringer
Shire Post Mint
Springdale, AR 72764

Hi Stud722:

Greetings Michigander!

I don't have enough posts to put a link here... but if you were to just google "shire post mint" and scroll down and find your way to the Online-Store link, there is a category called "Bullion Coins and Bars" and this is currently the only item in that category, where it's called the "One troy ounce copper bullion coin". It's also on my Private Stock list, which I can provide on request by email.

Way I look at copper: It's money that could've been put into a REAL Precious Metal that will be skyrocketing in value over time.

Opportunity Cost is a big deal for me, thus no Copper.