Coin Jewellery - Is It Wrong?

last week/this week, someone posted pictures of pendants they made of coins that had no real numismatic value, nice looking pieces.
IMHO its better as jewelry than going in the melt bucket.

The other week I was talking to my dealer and he had just purchased a 3 dollar gold. He said it had EF details, when he handed it to me I saw that it was polished plus it had a loop put on it to hang on a necklace. IMHO, its way better to put a loop on a coin than to drill a hole through it. (prefer neither)

Maybe on the modern 1/10 oz gold, but not on a dang 3 dollar piece:(

As a coin collector I'm not sure which is worse. Coins made into jewlery or coins melted down to make jewlery.
In some ways if a coin is made into jewlery or many of the other things coins are made into, they still exist. Once melted down to just metal, they are completely lost to the world forever.
I would think the average collector would get really upset seeing a 1916D Mercury dime made into a charm for a bracelet. BUT if melted down for just silver, who would ever know?
Sort of like taking apart a 1957 Chevy Convetible for parts like headlights.

I make coin jewelry all the time mostly from culls or from metal detecting finds.
I have no problem altering a common coin that has little or no numismatic value.
It helps fund my acquisitions.

I have two belt buckles with common dated Morgan dollars in them (both given to me). One buckle I have attached to a belt that has four Oregon trail halves attached to it. It is an attractive set up and I wear it often. At least the coins are visible and used instead of melted down into a appealing lump of metal.

The problem is, those hypothetical "collectors of tomorrow" aren't here right now, and there's no "Save The Coins Foundation" out there prepared to pay big bucks on their behalf to protecting cheap low-grade common coins on "their" behalf. Because unless there's some kind of incentive for the jewellery-makers and coin-melters to not destroy coins, coins will continue to be destroyed, for jewellery purposes as well as for other reasons. They always have been, and probably always will, for as long as coins continue to be made of recyclable materials.

Even rarity and high collector value is no absolute guarantee that coins will not be destroyed. An extreme example: in 1906 a wealthy American tourist visiting Italy broke his false teeth, so to replace it he bought nine rare ancient and mediaeval gold coins (worth $5000 back in 1906!) and had them re-carved into dentures. A skilled Neapolitan dentist managed to preserve as much of the detail on the coins as possible, under the circumstances. If you've got the stomach for it, you can see before-and-after shots of the coins on this FORVM thread.

Wrong? We as collectors would undoubtedly say "yes" to conspicuous consumption like this. But there's certainly nothing illegal or immoral about it.

Well, trying a stunt like that would be illegal in Italy today, where cultural protection laws mean anything older than AD 1500 belongs to the State, and (a) can't be sold to foreigners, or (b) deliberately destroyed. And unless you want to advocate the introduction of similar laws in America to curtail what people are allowed to do with their own personal property, there's not much that can be done to stop it.

Quite simply if it's not breaking a law then it's not wrong. It may be incredibly daft in some cases (key dates etc.) and is certainly abhorrent to some but as stated in a previous post has always gone on and most likely always will go on.

As for any possible future numismatic value of now common coins one could argue that without this rate of attrition there would probably be hardly any future numismatic value in such coins anyway.

Norm