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 Replies: 9 / Views: 2,631 |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1804 Posts |
According to *, (did I spell that right?) $0.1761145 is the melt value for one clad nickel copper 1971-1978 Eisenhower dollar on February 07, 2014. Copper and Nickel is a base metal, but still, it is a hard commodity. Accordingly, you have a melt value of $176.11 for every 1000 coins. 1000 coins weigh approx. 50 pounds. Comments? |
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Bedrock of the Community
13014 Posts |
Why? Its worth more at face value
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Valued Member
United States
96 Posts |
They haven't been de-monetized so those 1,000 coins are worth $1,000 at face value, nobody is going to melt coins at an 83% loss.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4333 Posts |
They make great boat anchors.
When I listen to LED ZEPPELIN...so do my neighbors...
Roll hunting since '77
Dirt fishing since '72
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Pillar of the Community
United Kingdom
837 Posts |
Oh that melt value   I guess it will be one heck of a waiting game for it be good !  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3079 Posts |
It is line with all the other current of in use coins. No matter how hard some want copper,nickel and other metals to be worth more in the future Copper has gone up a couple pennies but is $3.00 and change a pound. Nickle has gone up about 7ยข today.
With the cost involved in smelting and separating the metals. It's going to be a long time before it is stacking time for these metals!
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Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Are you taking into account the melt value that it had back when it was minted? I think that's the only relevant comparison one can make. Today's value only belittles that mighty coin (coming from someone who uses Canadian coins daily, I can say that the Ike is WAY too big for its value).
I guess you can profit off them if you BOUGHT them as scrap, but who's going to do that when it says ONE DOLLAR on it? People just kind of believe whatever's printed, or minted in this case.
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Moderator
 Australia
16805 Posts |
There are several websites you can go to which will calculate for you the "scrap value" of base-metal coins. For example, if a coin weighs 10 grams and is made of 75% copper and 25% nickel, then the website simply does the math (7.5 x price of copper in grams + 2.5 x price of copper in grams) and spits out the final number as the "scrap value". What such websites do not take into account, however, is the cost of separation. Very few people who want to buy either copper or nickel will want to buy a pre-mixed alloy of the two.
Ikes, like most other modern American coins, are clad. So if you're going to sell them for scrap, you either have to strip off or otherwise separate the cladding, or melt down the whole coin and do the separation later. Separating metals once they are mixed together in an alloy is difficult, and in the scrap base-metal business, "difficult" translates directly to "expensive". This extra cost is negligible for silver and gold coins, but not for base metals.
This cost-of-processing is even more significant if the goal is to extract all of the different metals in a coin. It is far easier to extract out and purify just one metal you are interested in and throw away the dregs. To turn a piece of cupronickel into two smaller pieces of pure copper and pure nickel costs much, much more than turning it into a smaller piece of copper and a bottle of chemical waste.
In short, for the TLDR crowd: these websites assume you can toss the coin into a Magic Box and separate the alloy into its elemental components, for free. We do not yet own such Star-Trek-like technology. So even if the dollar falls and/or base metal prices rise to make an Ike "worth melting", it's still not worth melting them.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Valued Member
United States
102 Posts |
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Pillar of the Community
 United States
1804 Posts |
Quote:
I'll give a .50 each Know where I can buy 'em at $.50? |
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Replies: 9 / Views: 2,631 |
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Posted 02/07/2014 5:17 pm
