Anyone Have Tips On XRF Rental?

Let me offer a different pathway. Can you make friends with a materials science professor at the local university and gain a couple hours of access for a small grant to the department?

Thanks for the replies.
I did learn some things about my project: 1) I can visit a precious metals dealer a couple hours away and pay him for his time using his tabletop machine, but I would have to limit the coins to cover only a couple hours usage. At $300 cost, I may settle for that and pick & choose which coins are most troublesome for me to detect on my own.
2) Inquiry to Notre Dame went unanswered, I may have to visit to present my subject directly. The idea of a grant is interesting in exchange for testing and giving me my wanted data.
3) From what I can tell, I do not know if I can get get a printed slip showing the scan results from the machines I have looked at. I see some of these only display results on a screen after testing. I'd need to have a lot of coins all sorted & numbered so I can add a printed copy for each coin after each coin was scanned. Then I could post-process the data applying it to each worksheet for the subject coins.

I've rented a Thermo Fisher Niton XL2 model handheld for a non-numismatic use (measurement of metal content in plastics), but it was a while ago (8 years). It's easy to use, and I am not sure if it is standard with the rental, but you can get a stand that more or less turns it into "tabletop." You can find the specifications online https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/...n-guide.html I am guessing it would also work for coins, but you could inquire about that, and I would make sure I had some reference materials of known composition to use as standards.

Also, having read a few of the threads where SPPOttawa commented on XRF, it sounds like this would be your best source of advice for numismatic applications.

Whichever way you decide to go, good luck!