is there a machine that will sort silver coins?

[silvercop]

just wondering if any such thing exists? sure would be easy to search if you had a machine that you could pour coins into and it would spit out the silver for you. i did a search on google and did not come up with anything. anybody ever hear of one?

 

[Omega]

To many posts to read threw, so sorry if someone said it already, but Andy's Ryedales sort out silver

 

[LooseChange]

I've been doing my homework on separating silver coins from clad and found only four methods that can scientifically work (based on sorting halves):

1) Electrical resistance - this is impractical for many reasons, including requiring > 20 amps to test effectively.
2) Weight differential - look it up, but the difference for 90% (12.50g) 40% (11.5g) and clad (11.34g) - the hitch is a scale with +/- 5% accuracy and automating weighing
3) Coefficient of Restitution (again, look it up) - silver bounces differently off a very hard surface. I have been told the Fed banks use this method to strip silver from the coinage stream. Simple: bounce coins toward a barrier - some bounce higher and over, some don't.
4) Using Lenz's Law: a counter-electromotive force will be induced in copper when the coins move through a magnetic field. The cause of this CEMF is due to 'eddy currents'. That is, CEMF is a force caused by eddy currents as explained by Lenz's Law. The practical upshot of all this is that if you shoot a conductive object through a magnetic field it will slow down...

Don't forget

5) Spectroscopy (look it up). Many on here are familiar with the "tissue test". The "tissue test" is a method where the human eye is the visual detector that analyses the fluorescence of silver or silver alloy using a kleenex as the filter.

6) Mechanical resonance (look it up). The one most members here are familiar with is acoustic resonance - the "sound test". Different metals and alloys have different natural frequencies. Dropping a silver coin on a hard surface causes a different ring than dropping a cladded copper coin.

. . . Further, below is a report of my stuffing a bunch of coins into a coin counter at the local Publix - not Coinstar, but a type that has a turntable-like dish in the top where some rejects remain. Will post again when I check more about the machine. Results speak for themselves...

Did you really "discard" $0.85 face of 90% in the name of science?

...Fiiiinally, I'm heading for my Credit Union on Monday for test #2, a repeat of the below method. An employee swears this Swedish "Scan Coin" device rejects silver, but I seriously doubt she has any idea what she's talking about...

I guarantee that the green CoinStar machines in Walmarts and Grocery Stores reject silver. I sometimes sort dimes directly that way if I need an Amazon gift card refill.