Pocket change

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11C1P

Yellow Jacket
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Ended a several month long dry spell and found a 1941 quarter in my change today. Actually the wife found it when she was going to get some quarters for one of my daughters who lost a tooth. I just love getting $4+ for free, especially when I'm not shorting someones till. Also that's the first quarter I've found in even longer. Found a few dimes in the last year to year 1/2. I think it's harder to read the dimes and also easier to notice the sandwich layer on a quarter, so maybe they get picked out more thoroughly, just a theory.
 
Congratulations! For me I miss having silver dollars in circulation. The new dollar coin just doesn't feel right. Too much like a quarter and quarter is only worth a nickle now and the penny isn't even worth making so pretty soon they are going to have to re-do this whole coin and paper dollar thing because inflation is baked into the cake and the coins are all messed up. Why is a nickle bigger than a dime?
 
Nickels are bigger than dimes because back when both were designed, as we know, a dime was mostly-silver, and a nickel mostly-nickel. And back then you could give a kid a nickel - nice large coin, and he could actually buy something with it.

Nickels are good to calibrate scales with - they weigh precisely 5 grams. Handy bit of knowledge.

I stock pennies, old and new. The old ones are mostly-copper - nice metal - and the new ones are a thick copper plate over zinc, which is now worth over a penny and a useful metal in its own right.
Easy to extract as zinc chloride - a useful plumbing flux. Just file through a corner and dunk in HCl.
Next morning you have a hollow penny and a zinc chloride solution (if you do the proportions right, else there will be HCl left).
 
I don't recall ever finding a wartime nickel in my change. I do seem to find a lot of steel pennies for some reason though. Back when I ran my weekly poker tournaments I also had a side game with .50/$1 blinds and had to always have 1/4's & 1/2's on hand for cashing people out (Ok, I didn't really need the 1/2's I just liked them) and so I would find a few here and there when I bought the rolls, now that I don't run a game any longer it's not so much, but I still do go buy a few rolls of 1/2's every other week. Now that I have all my kids to help me sort through the change jar every so often it's generally a bit easier for me to find them as well.
 
I have precisely one wartime (some silver) nickel in my collection. It was bought at a premium at a coin shop by a friend as a gift. We use silver in the rad lab as a way to detect/integrate neutron flux, and he thought it would be cool for that. But pure silver foil is so cheap (and the right size)...I left the nickel in its packaging.
 
I have precisely one wartime (some silver) nickel in my collection. It was bought at a premium at a coin shop by a friend as a gift. We use silver in the rad lab as a way to detect/integrate neutron flux, and he thought it would be cool for that. But pure silver foil is so cheap (and the right size)...I left the nickel in its packaging.

back when we were buying LOTS of 90% I bought a load from a guy in La, and about 100.00 was war nickles. The guy I was in it with thought they were pretty cool and opted to take them as part of his half. So now I have exactly one war nickle also. I do remember thinking that they would be awfully hard to unload in a SHTF situation...
 
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