Hobo Nickels

Hi Collin,
It's not a stupid question at all and the answer is nope it's not illegal to carve coins. I've been asked that question many times and always knew it wasn't illegal but really didn't know why. I grew up like everyone else believing that "IT'S ILLEGAL TO ALTER MONEY" and thinking that somehow, when we were kids, the coin police would come and arrest us for putting pennies on the railroad tracks during the boring days of summer. lol
Then one night I was watching TV and the local channel had a show telling about interesting places to visit in Nevada. This episode had to do with the Carson City mint and it's history and even though I am not a coin collector I love shows about how things are made and how changes came about. So, in this episode they explained how when they first started minting coins, the edges of the coins were smooth. The first coins that were minted,were made from silver or gold, well it seems the bad guys at the time would shave the edges and collect the shavings then cash them in at the assay office. This was a real problem for the mint and the bankers and something had to be done about it because at that time, there was no law on the books about what was being done. In steps the lawmakers and they come up with a law... get ready for this because it is going to make sense out of the law we all think we grew up with, remember...."it's illegal to alter money" ...
We'll get to the law in a minute after this part of the story because it's really neat. So the mint was looking into solving this problem and the word was out that they were looking help among other mints. So one day they were contacted by I think it was a dutch mint and this mint told that mint they solved that problem and they did it by putting READING on the edge of the coin. READING on a coin is the little lines on the edge of the coin...with READING it would be obvious to anyone, bankers, barkeepers and any other business, if the coin was shaved and thats why we have those rough edges on coins.
Ok back to the law...so they wrote this law. this isn't word for word but it will give you the meaning of that law. "It is illegal to shave, file, drill or alter money in any way (and here's the part we never hear) for the purpose to deceive, fraud or cheat someone"... so it's not illegal to carve coins. If I used my skills to alter a date or add a mint mark in order to give someone the impression that the coin is something it's not for the reason to get money from some "sucker" that would fall for it....then I would be breaking that law big time.

I don't know if they retain their legal tender status, maybe Tom or one of the other coin collectors can shed some light on that...thats a good question.
In my opinion. I don't think it matters, at the point of a finished carving, it's not about the coin anymore...the coin was mearly a canvass that the carver gets to play on with his carving. It's all about Art from that point on. Is it still legal tender? beats me but anytime anyone wants to spend the money on one of my carvings to see if he or she can spend it as a nickel, I have a whole bunch of nickels for sale for them to try...lol

You should do a few trillion dollar coins to give to the Treasury Dept. to pay off the national debt to the private federal reserve system- I'm sure the common Citizen would want this done if they knew better.