Snow bound boredom; coin sorting with the F75 LTD

[tvr]

Just starting to see very small bare spots ... maybe next weekend I'll get some hunting in.

Wife got out the big coin jar this evening and started rolling coins for vacation money. I wanted to sort the copper vs zinc pennies and save the copper for now. She asks what dates? We had a building pile of 1982's. So needed to figure out which 1982's were copper and which were zinc.

Fired up the LTD, sensitivity 10 (as I was sitting right next to the computer) 3H, zero disc. Made real short order on the 1982's and went ahead and finished the rest of the penny sorting since high tone / mid tone sorting of copper and zinc was much faster than eye balling the dates. Zincs rang in at mid tone 60 to 62 and the coppers were consistently dead on 70, high tone.

Exciting stuff. (yea right!)
Cheers,
tvr

 

[psyvad]

Is the copper in a copper penny worth more than one cent? If you use 4/4H tones, you won't even need to look at the ID numbers as the zincs have a different tone than the coppers.
Good luck with the weather!

Bart

 

[tvr]

Copper penny has about 3 cents of melt value for the copper, but the refineries I've looked at take a higher percentage cut for copper than then do for gold or silver. Haven't sold any copper from coins yet, but I'm saving them.

Zincs go mid tone on 3H. I just did a sampling of TID numbers to satisfy my curiosity on repeatability in the "air test". It is much faster to sort on tone.
Cheers,
tvr