IDX --
I love this thread; Joe and I went through this exact same thing -- he and I -- a few months ago, regarding these "strange reading" war nickels. The only difference being that I have hunted with Joe many times, and thus I know that he knows exactly what he's doing (he's been doing this a LONG time) -- and thus he didn't have to "convince" me, I just went straight to the "let me try and figure out the "why" and the "how" of this."
So, when he told me about the various readings of the war nickels he was digging, I asked him to send them to me. I have a small collection, including three that Joe sent me, that read anywhere from the normal "13" on the EQX (12-13 on the CTX), all the way up to Joe's 12-42 (on the CTX) one, and everywhere in between. I did alot of research, talked to alot of people, detectorists, and otherwise, on various forums.
Eventually, I DID have some XRF analysis done on a few of the nickels -- the three Joe sent them to me (OH, Joe, please remind me to send them back to you, LOL!) But, as far as XRF goes -- as much as I had hoped, I found out that that's not a "magic bullet," either. XRF is MUCH more complicated than you'd think, you have to use the right "calibrations," and set the machine to proper voltages depending upon the metal you are looking for, and the lab that did the analyses for me was not set up for analyzing the metals I was interested in -- especially not noble metals. They were more geared toward oil exploration, and doing XRF of rock core samples, in search of oil. So they didn't have the right "calibration data" to use, to calibrate their XRF to look for things like silver, etc.; they didn't know what voltages to use...they simply had no experience looking for the metals I was wanting info on. So, we did the best we could (it was free, so I could not complain!) Though I was not able to get ANY info on silver content, one thing I was able to find out, was that the amount of copper and manganese varied wildly within the coins. It became clear that these coins were almost DEFINITELY not minted to specific standards, in terms of metal content. It's almost like they just threw together whatever they had available, with availability of certain metals likely dictated by the ongoing war. Here is a thread I started, over at a coin forum. It's an interesting read, I think (results of the XRF are posted on like page 4 of the thread).
https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=319459
This remains a mystery, that I'm not sure exactly how to solve, but there are definitely "secrets" that even the 2018 U.S. Mint may no longer know, about what went on back then with the minting of the "war nickel."
Steve
