Re: Bronze 1983 Lincoln Cent found

On Sat, "bri" <youare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Must be they really mean a copper planchet '83? Technically speaking they
only made bronze Lincolns--which is just 95% copper and 5% tin--from '44 to
'45.

Copper and tin is bronze, but 5 percent is a very
small amount.

While all the others would be copper, tin and zinc. 95% copper and 5%
zinc and tin.

Which should be called soft brass, .5 percent is hardly
enough tin to merit calling it bronze.

Then in '82 they switched to zinc planchets plated with a
little copper just to give it some color to match the other trillions of
cents. 99.2% zinc with a puny .08% copper.
I know that they also made some bronze clad steel planchets in '74 right
along side of those 10 aluminum cents.
Then there's brass--don't even ask me where that came from. I see some
places call '74 to '82 as brass.

Probably because of the color, unless the alloy
can be tested without destroying the coin.

Chances are a lot of these types of things are
intentionally made, and smuggled out, to have a friend
sell them later.

But with the mint buying ready made planchets,
anything is possible. It would seem prudent to write
in the planchet contract that no other metal planchets
be made in the same factory building as the US planchets,
while aluminum does have a desirable attribute (a thin
layer of the surface can convert to corundum (sapphire)
because of oxidation, the weight is not a desirable feature.

Rumors of wrong metal planchets abound, and
may be what keeps dreamers interested in treasure
hunting.
Chances are, by the time anybody hears about
a possible freak, a dealer/speculator group has already
bought up all possible containers of the denomination.

And a suspicious person may imagine that the
very reason for the mint to change from 30 pound
canvas bags to ton bags is to help the coin distribution
corner the market for flukes.

And they are selling the "used" canvas bags,
but when I bought my pennies the same bags were
being sold by the same dealer, who may have also
had a sewing machine.

But that is just my personal excuse to explain
the fact that I didn't find any DDOs. :-)

Joe Fischer

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