Before I start I wanna say I just joined this site or any coin related site so take it semi-easy on me. That being said, I found a 1993D penny on my property & its larger& its not copper. Before u say its a "Texas Cent" or acid was used let me tell why I doubt that. I found it at my house, in a small farm town where ppl didn't do that crap to coins in 1993, they wouldn't know how. I was in high school then with all 300 ppl& we didnt use acid in science. My Garret AT Pro shows a VDI of 70 not 82+ for copper pennies& i have pics under a microscope. When I figure out how to load them from my cell I will. It looks like aluminum, its very light also.
It's probably reading only the zinc. 1993 Cents are struck on Copper Plated zinc planchets. If the plating was missing or removed then you only have the zinc left which is close to aluminum in appearance.
Welcome to the neighborhood @EricAT-Pro ! Like Mr. P. said, the core of your penny is zinc. Beginning in 1982, the US Mint changed the composition of the penny from 95% copper to 97.5% zinc.
As someone who's knowledge of metal detecting is so small you could write it on the back of a postage stamp, and still leave room for the Gettysburg Address, do all machines show the same rating (values?) for different metals
No, each machine is different. It depends on how the engineers design them. EricAT-Pro's machine reads 82 for copper cents, the one I use ID's them around 21. I do have to say though, the poster's description of his coin is a perfect description of a Texas cent. Would like to see pictures though.
Thank you. So, if I were to purchase one, the user manual would presumably show the list of scales per type of metal. The reason I ask is we have a villa in the mountains in Spain in an area which was populated by the Visigoths and then the Moors up to around the 15th century. Much Moorish pottery and artifacts are regularly found by people walking in the hills. As our property has almost 2 hectares of land I am thinking of detecting over it.
The manual should give you some idea, but it is always best to do some testing with your machine. They are far from infallible though, many trash items will read like a coin. Deep targets may differ in ID from shallower targets. Familiarity with your machine is vital.
Thanks. Although coinage would be great to find, my primary goal is to find some artifacts of any type from the past where my property now stands. I would like a showcase of local history.
Then either you never took chemistry (most people don't), or your school had an even more substandard educational system than mine did, and ours was pretty bad. (You aren't going to teach chemistry without acids.) Also coins circulate so it could have been done elsewhere and then came into your community. And if it is larger, but the design is still proportional (Looks like a regular cent but just bigger) then it is most definitely a "Texas cent". The only way to have it larger but still proportional would be for the Mint to have used bigger dies and planchets. And a bigger die would have meant a bigger hub, bigger planchets, and a special collar with a larger diameter opening.
