This may be old news to some, but there will be some new 5-cent pieces in commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark's expedition:
http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/index.cfm?action=nickel_series

A worthy commemoration for a purchase that made a huge increase in American territory.

At least the U.S. mint keeps coins the same size. Over here the sizes seem to change with alarming regularity these days.

In Colombia, the old (probably withdrawn from circulation by now) 5 and 10 peso coins were the size of American dollars when I was a child.

The singles were the size of an American 25 cent piece except half a millimeter thicker, so you couldn't use them in an American coin phone.

The single peso was then discontinued and the 5 and 10s were then shrunk down to the size of nickles (10 peso) and dimes (5 peso) presumably to save on brass or whatever their alloy is. All Colombian coins ranging from the 5 peso to the 100 peso coin have the same design and same color. Just size varies. Guess it makes it cheaper to make. The 200 and 500 have their own designs.

Currently the value of the peso is almost C$3,000 to US$1, rounding up. Precisely it's C$2,800 to US$1. Denominations that used to be bills were then converted to coins (e.g.: 500 pesos, 100 pesos, etc.). Now bills are for amounts in the thousands.

I guess as the value of the metal is more than the face value of the coin......

Now if only the US Mint would start giving tours to the general public again.....did they ever?

I wish American coins would have fancy things like holes or weird shapes (squares, flower-outline) or even the thing that Canadian two-dollar coins have -- a slug of one alloy inset in the ring made of another alloy....I also wish our paper money were color coded....blue, pink, green, gray, light brown, purple, etc. Would make it much easier to sort.

Do they call these bills "Kilopesos"?

Nah... Real money is green! Foreign money looks really strange. And if our penny had a hole in the middle, people would be using them as washers. How often did you use pennies for metal shims? :-)

If pennies had a hole in them they couldn't have been used behind plug fuses in the old days.

Speaking of holes in pennies... At times I'v been a little bit of a tightwad, to the point of spending hours of my time to save a few dollars. I've since loosened up and while I look for good deals, I consider my time before I shop around too much. Anyway, back to the penny. I once needed some washers for a tool box and for convienence and to save money, I drilled a 1/4" hole in some pennies to make them. The pennies cost $.01 ea, a washer would be about $.05. Well to me if I could save 4 cents each, it was a no brainer.

Which brings me back to the nickels.

What was that saying about squeezing a nickel?

I don't know about the US mint, but the Canadian mint located in Winnipeg Manitoba gives tours for $2.00 a person.

They have a glassed walkway looking over the production floor so you can see how all the different machines punch the slugs out, then stamp the design on them.

Winnipeg does all the general circulation coins, Ottawa Ontario has another mint that does all the coins that go in the collector sets. They also do tours at that mint site.

More info on the Winnipeg tour here: http://www.mint.ca/en/about_the_mint/locations/Winnipeg_tours.htm?cookie%5Ftest=1

mbhydro:

Thanks for the info. The US Mint gives tours only in Philadelphia and Denver .

I grew up in Philly, and I remember visiting the mint. Same kind of setup, that is, looking through the glass. Apparently, the employees must pass through some sort of extremely sensitive metal detector at the end of the day

What ever happened with the stolen mint die from the Loon dollars? (Or am I confusing something else?)

Thinkgood
It was not the loonie (Cdn $1 coin) die that went missing but the first choice for that coin.

If I remember properly the first choice design was two voyagers in a canoe. The story was that it was sent by normal courier to the mint but never showed up and has never been seen since. Probably show up in twenty years in the dead letter office.

A more secure method was used when the two dollar coin die (aka the toonie) was sent to the mint.

About the Louisiana Purchase, heard a story (which may or may not be accurate) about Napoliean needing some cash to fund his military. And that the USA was a bit uneasy having to ship its inland farm products thru a foriegn port (New Orelands). So we offer $10 million for New Orelands, and Napolien says "Make it 15, and I'll throw in all that land behind it". He knew that he wouldn't be able to control the Louisiana Purchase land much longer anyway, so might as well sell it before he loses it. He was busy fighting with his European neighbor countries, and needed some quick cash for his armies.

I bet the Russians during the cold war regretted having sold us Alaska earlier....

As for coins with center holes, some Japanese coins are like that. Was over there some years ago on a job with a major TV manufacturer. We were assembling a laboratory prototype TV set, and I needed some washers. So I reached into my pocket and pulled some of those coins and used them as washers. Bad move, the Japanese guys didn't like that at all..... Like the time I went and turned the office thermostat down a few degrees. It was winter, and everyone was sweating their asses off. Arrgggg... Seems something like that should go to a Senate subcommittee meeting, etc. I just went and did it. I thought it too obvious and trivial to waste the boss's time on....

The British £2 coin (introduced quite recently) is such a design, as is the new 2 Euro coin, and the old French 10 franc.


Many Brits on their first exposure to U.S. money seem to find it odd that all bills are the same size and color. (British notes at present are £5: Blue/green, £10 Orange/brown, £20 purple, etc.)

I find the style of U.S. banknotes to be reassuringly traditional. They actually look and feel like "real money."

I remember hearing something about pink $20 bills soon to come out though. I found it really weird when I saw US$ bills for the first time. Back then we had our good old Schilling currency, and the bills were like this: ATS 20 some kind of brown, ATS 50 a dark purple, ATS 100 green, ATS 500 arather light orange-brown, ATS 1000 blue (Common saying: "How much is that?" "Helluva expensive. Five blues!". Another name for the ATS 1000 bills was "rag", or (rare) a "Schroedinger" (the guy who was on the back of the bill)) and ATS 5000 brown again. 5000 Schilling bills weren't too common and were always referred to as "Mozarts". Size was different too, increasing with the value.

I remember when the Canadian $2 coin first came out there were all sorts of stories in the news about people trying to force the center section of the coin out.