War Nickle Vdi's

[Dan(NM)]

I posted this on another forum as well looking for some input on war nickle VDI's

 

I've been hunting an old baseball field for the last couple of days, cherry picking though an unbelievable amount of trash targets. I scored silver 2 days in a row, using a fast recovery speed and basically 2 tones. I decided today to open up the nickle range to see if I could score some nickles, especially war nickles. Withing 45 minutes I had 5 nickles in my pouch, nothing old or deep, but a solid 13 VDI. I decided to go back tomorrow and see if I could pick out some silver nickles among the garbage. So, tonight I pulled out 15 or so war nickles to see what VDI I could expect, well...They read from 13 all the way to 24?? I did the test twice and the numbers differed from nickle to nickle, that just shot my narrow nickle range all to hell.
Maybe someone else could pull out some war nickles and see what you come up with.
 

[Guest Tnsharpshooter]

Number 13.

Now the alloy mix on those war nickels, Nox might be seeing with processing.  I had that happen with Etrac a few times on war nickels- they read 43 conductive in the ground.

[Dan(NM)]

5 minutes ago, Tnsharpshooter said:

Number 13.

Now the alloy mix on those war nickels, Nox might be seeing with processing.  I had that happen with Etrac a few times on war nickels- they read 43 conductive in the ground.

The highest reading I got with the Etrac was 31 in the ground. The nickle was a black disc, covered in a layer of black crust.

I guess I'll have to dig a few, but, there's an awful lot of crap that falls between 13 and 24 at that old field.

[Chase Goldman]

48 minutes ago, Dan(NM) said:

The highest reading I got with the Etrac was 31 in the ground. The nickle was a black disc, covered in a layer of black crust.

I guess I'll have to dig a few, but, there's an awful lot of crap that falls between 13 and 24 at that old field.

Hard for me to tell the situation because you did not (thankfully) list the VDI of each test war nickel.  Where they mostly clustered around 13 with a few  scattered between 15 and 24 or did you hit every single number between 13 and 24 with the 15 sample nickels? 

Presuming the former (i.e., most clustered around 13 - 15) , then if you are going to cherry pick, then by definition you are playing the percentages and by definition you are going to leave something in the ground.  If that is going to happen then just keep a narrow range (e.g., 13 -15) and be content with the fact that a few outliers are going to fall outside that range and will still be there.  Otherwise, what is the point if you start digging a bunch of unwanted targets just to catch those two or three outliers. 

If they were hitting just about every VID number between 13 and 24 then, yeah, it seems fruitless (pun intended) to cherry pick, because you are really no longer cherry picking.  Just my thinking, anyway.

[Tiftaaft]

I dug a war nickel this past weekend, 5 or 6".  Solid 14 in the ground, solid 14 in the air.  

[steveg]

Dan(NM)...

I have a very close friend/detecting buddy, who was hunting a site a few weeks ago with his CTX. He was digging ONLY the deepest of targets (minimum 8" deep, as all the oldies at this site are 8" plus). He hit a target on the CTX that was reading 12-40 to 12-41. He figured "wheat cent," but due to the depth, he will occasional dig dimes at 12-39 to 12-40 to 12-41 at that site. So, he dug it, thinking wheat but hoping silver dime. And out popped....

...A WAR NICKEL!

SO, I told him -- NO WAY. There HAD to be something else in the hole, skewing that ID number...or else it was the fact that at just over 12" deep, the machine was unable to give accurate ID and it "up-averaged" it. He told me that he has seen them ID anywhere from 12-8 to 12-43. I thought "yeah, maybe in the ground, in strange situations/orientations or whatever..."

Since I was still skeptical (to say the least), he fetched it, and air tested it for me. And??????

...

12-42 to 12-45!!! 

Moral of the story? Your 24 war nickel is roughly equivalent to his 12-43 war nickel (both "penny" IDs on the respective machines).  

 

It also lines up with tnss's 43-conductive war nickel on his E-Trac.

Here's my best guess:

According to the U.S. Mint, war nickels were minted from 35% silver, 9% manganese, and 56% copper. SO, the REAL question -- and it's one I've asked myself MANY times, is WHY should a war nickel read AT ALL like a regular nickel? If you took out the 9% manganese, and made them 44% silver and 56% copper, or 35% silver and 65% copper, whatever, you'd expect a very high-conductive coin. So, it MUST be the manganese mixed in, right? A supporting piece of evidence is that manganese is a poor conductor -- SO, it stands to reason that mixing in some manganese to an otherwise high-conductive mix, that you could end up with something that conducts "roughly the same" as nickel, right?

WELL, if I am right, and it's the poorly-conductive manganese that brings the target ID of a war nickel down, into "regular nickel" range, THEN...perhaps some batches of war nickels were made WITHOUT the manganese? Perhaps they are just silver/copper mixes -- and thus the crazy, "high-conductive" ID values?

Interesting stuff, Dan!  Thanks for sharing!

Steve

[dewcon4414]

Might check the ment mark.......I believe the war nickels with that composition were only made with the P (Philadelphia) ment mark..   During this period D and S were mented but not of this alloy....... also nickels without a mint mark are counterfeit.

[Jeff in Pa]

I have a couple that also hit that high out of the ground. I would say steveg has logical explanation.

[GB_Amateur]

2 hours ago, dewcon4414 said:

Might check the ment mark.......I believe the war nickels with that composition were only made with the P (Philadelphia) ment mark..   During this period D and S were mented but not of this alloy....... also nickels without a mint mark are counterfeit.

Pretty sure all Warnicks are of the same composition.  All have a large mintmask {P,D,S} above the dome.  There were 1942 five cent pieces made of the standard copper+nickel composition but those don't have the large mintmarks.

6 hours ago, steveg said:

WELL, if I am right, and it's the poorly-conductive manganese that brings the target ID of a war nickel down, into "regular nickel" range, THEN...perhaps some batches of war nickels were made WITHOUT the manganese? Perhaps they are just silver/copper mixes -- and thus the crazy, "high-conductive" ID values?

Very unlikely, and if this were a common occurrence the coin collecting world would have figured it out long ago. There might be a few off-metal examples out there, but what I'm reading here is that this is a common occurence.

6 hours ago, steveg said:

If you took out the 9% manganese, and made them 44% silver and 56% copper, or 35% silver and 65% copper, whatever, you'd expect a very high-conductive coin.

Alloys can be tricky.  The arrangement of the atoms (and thus their electrons) can lead to higher or lower conductivity than the constituent pure metals.  There probably are some alloys out there with 65-35 copper silver ratio.  But without testing I would not assume they are up there with either near pure silver or near pure copper.  Steve has talked about this may times with respect to gold alloys.

6 hours ago, steveg said:

So, it MUST be the manganese mixed in, right?

This strikes me as an hypothesis with a chance of being right.  In the ground there could be physical and/or chemical reactions which affect the arrangement of atoms, possibly leach out manganese, or even pull in some other chemical (oxygen being the obvious culprit).  I don't think that action would be uniform throughout but it could be enough affect on the surface to change the response (conductivity reading) in a metal detector.  Don't we see this with the dreaded Zincolns?  (I don't mean the ones that lose material, but the ones that are all there but crusted really badly.)  Still, going all the way from standard nickel up to standard copper penny with a surface modification?

Mystery still to be solved....

[dewcon4414]

We having issues with coins/silver?