Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy Baker
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Uh, Andy ... those little beauties cost $240 each and are smaller than a penny. Each one contains about 1.2 gram of gold, alloyed with a smaller mass (but about equal volume) of something with lower density -- maybe silver, maybe copper or ? Mass of each coin is not specified in the ad, but is probably about 2 gram; i.e., about 80% the mass of a penny.
In cost-effectiveness terms, that's a lot of buck for not much bang.
A more practical alternative, and one that many FTC teams would actually choose, is steel ballast. One example is 0.75" diameter low carbon steel bar stock, McMaster 8920K19, $31.12 for a 6 ft. bar. An eight inch length of this bar stock would give you the same ballast mass as the aforementioned eleven inch stack of pennies, at a pro-rated cost (which assumes you have another use for the rest of the bar) of $3.45. About 1.9 times the cost of the Penny ballast, with 11/8 = 1.375 times the density. Steel is looking good compared to U.S. Nickels, and VERY good compared to gold coins.
But again, in terms of cost-effectiveness, the U.S. Penny is hard to match.
__________________
Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)