Today's Newer Coins Feel "Cheap" To Me

I hear ya. I'd much rather hold pre-64 silver over clad coins anyday. And copper coins over zinc. It just feels like real money.

But, you may also be pointing out one reason to save them. Their survival rate.

Especially the zincolns. Look at the ones you pull roll-searching now. Some of them, I'm almost too ashamed to even re-roll.

Almost.

Clad quaters,nickles,dimes are all tougher then silver ones and wear out much less in circulation.

nickle just wears better then silver. Silver is to soft

Eazy way to see for yourself is just look at early 40's nickles
70 years in circulation still going strong.

Now the new cents feel cheap, as if the copper is even thinner then it was in the late 80's

agreed - especially zincolns. Also, I really don't like the new quarters with the parks. I think the designs are crummy. They try to jam a bunch of pictures on a tiny coin and it just looks dumb.

It has to do with the extremely high mintages and the high speed of striking need to produce that many coins. The old silver coins were struck at a rate of around 60 to 100 coins per minute (120 coins per minute when they were using the dual die setup in the presses. Now at 60 coins per minute that is 1 coin per second. During that second the feed fingers have to drop a planchet into the coining chamber, the fingers have to get out of the way, the obv die comes down and strikes the coin, the obverse die rises back up, the reverse die rises up pushing the coin out of the collar, the feed fingers come in and push the coin out of the way, and the reverse die drops back down. That is seven mechanical steps that have to take place in one second. Now when the coin is struck it takes a certain amount of time for the metal to flow into the recesses of the die. It is a short amount of time but it is a definite legth of time. If you increase the striking speed that means there is less time for the metal to flow. Then you have the problem that coppernickel is harder than silver and does not flow as fast.

So how do you compensate for the reduced flow time? Increasing the pressure doesn't help because it doesn't make the metal flow faster. So the obvious answer is to lower the relief so the metal doesn't have to flow as far. Well todays coins are struck at a rate of not 60 strikes per minute, but 750 stikes per minute. That is 13 coins per second. So the time of the strike and for the metal to flow is no longer .14 seconds it is now .01 seconds. Obviously the relief is going to have to be a LOT lower.

Many good reasons why I collect older coins.

I just can't get into modern coins.
(other than my beloved proof sets)
But I'm not much of a businessman and will probably regret
ignoring zincolns.

Conder, did you work at a mint previously? You have pretty in-depth insight over this process down to the "how can I hire less employees?" kind of thinking.

And, no, I don't think coins will be SO plain in the future. They still have to account for counterfeiters. The cheaper the materials are that are being used, the easier it will be to counterfeit. It seems like a child should be running things instead....

No they actually make MORE money for the mint when that happens.

Back in 1982 the copper cent blank cost .8 cents, the zinc blank .4 cents. When they made a cent they made .2 cents on the copper and .6 cents on the zinc (I am ignoring production costs) Now say over the life span of the copper cent they have to keep replacing the Zinc cents that corrode away and they have to do that five times. Not on the books they still show a .2 cent profit on that copper cent, but on the zinc cent they show .6 X 5 or Three Cents profit. Why because the corroded zincs just get tossed and don't come back for redemption. Yes it costs the mint Two Cents in metal instead of .8 cents but the profit margin is much greater.