If you learn nothing else from this guide, remember these two key points:

• You need to roll COPPER pennies, not zinc
• You need to roll CLEAN pennies

I'll tell you how to do both.


Why copper, and not zinc? Because copper can be cleaned and polished, plus it looks great. Zinc can look pretty bad, with white to silver streaks running through the coin, and you absolutely cannot clean or polish it. Anything you try to do with zinc coins only makes them look worse.

So, burn these numbers in your penny-smashing brain: Only use pre-1982 U.S. cent coins, and pre-1997 Canadian coins. Anything more recent than that is zinc. Canadian coins can be a little tougher to roll than U.S. coins, and you probably don’t want to get caught pressing them in Canada.

The good news is that pre-1982 pennies are easy to obtain. Right here on eBay you can find them by the roll, or even in a $50 U.S. Mint sealed bag. I got a bag of 1981 coins a couple years ago and I still have an awful lot of them left.

Another hint is to keep a couple rolls of them in the glove compartment of your car, along with a roll or two of quarters -- you never know when they will come in handy. For under $10 you can get coin sorting equipment and paper coin wrappers at WalMart or any office supply store. You are most interested in penny and quarter equipment and wrappers.

If you get a mint bag, or a bright uncirculated (BU) roll of pennies, chances are they will be clean enough to smash. If not, it doesn't take much work to clean copper coins. The easiest method involves ketchup and baking soda. I am not kidding.

Soak your dirty coins in a dish of ketchup for a few minutes. Then rub each coin between your finger and thumb until it cleans up. Rinse the ketchup off, and then rub the coin with baking soda, and rinse again. Ketchup is a good source of acid, which is what cleans the coin. Baking soda neutralizes the acid, plus it is mildly abrasive, which also helps clean and polish the coins. No ketchup available? Then use BBQ sauce.

If you want your coins to look a lot better, you can clean them with a metal polish, such as Brasso. It's much more work than the ketchup & baking soda method. A metal dip is another way to do it -- there are even special dips for coins, but you can only find them in coin shops. I have one friend who polishes his coins using a Dremel Mototool. You can almost see your reflection in them, and they look fantastic after they are pressed.

How can you display your elongated coins? One way is to buy 2" x 2" cardboard holders that are specifically made for elongated, as opposed to round, coins. You'll find them on eBay. The 2x2 holders then go into album pages, either designed for them, or for use with photographic slides. Both type of pages fit into a 3-ring binder.

The question that most people ask is, "How do I get my own coin smashing machine?" Well, you can buy them, starting at a thousand bucks, and up. Or, if you know how to operate machine tools, you can make your own. I built one using a jewelers press, which I also bought on eBay, for under $200. I had someone else engrave my design on one of the rollers. The person didn't do that good of a job, so I learned how to do it myself. The trouble is, I broke the press, so never got around to making any new designs.

A jewelers press isn't made to withstand the pressure needed to roll a coin. They are made from cast iron, which is really too brittle. I had to use an extension pipe to get the leverage I needed to roll the coin. On the other hand, a friend of mine has the same setup, and never had any trouble, including just using the arm that came with the machine to roll the coins. Just be aware that trying to use a jewelers press entails some tradeoffs, but it's about all you can expect, for the price.  With your own machine, you can roll your designs on nickels, dimes, aluminum foreign coins, and anything else you can fit between the rollers.

The most fun I have had with elongated coins is tracking them down in Japan. The only machines I've ever seen in that country have been electrical Eurolink presses. The early machines were called Penny Pressers, while most machine now refer to Souvenir Medallions. By far, the most machines in one area are at Tokyo Disney Resort (TDR). TDR consists of Tokyo Disneyland (TDL), Tokyo DisneySEA (TDS), and Resort hotels. Within the past year, new machines have been added to most of the Resort Line monorail stations.

The thing is that many of the elongated coins (ECs) at TDR are special event coins. This means they commemorate something special, such as a new attraction, an anniversary or something along those lines. Such coins only stay on-stage a relatively short period of time. TDL has a core issue of new coins every year, with other designs going on and off-stage as needed (such as Princess Days, Cinderellabration, Halloween and Christmas).

Those coins are "easy" to get, and I wanted to track down each and every EC in the country. I did it, too. There was only one location that was too remote for me to get to. You can read these EC adventures on my web site, which is easy to figure out, based on my eBay ID. For that matter, you can find my Squidoo Lens, based on my ID, as well. Or, just go to my eBay ME page, if my URL hints have been too subtle.

There's a most excellent club you can join, called The Elongated Collectors (TEC). The annual dues are reasonable, and each quarterly newsletter comes with an EC, plus you get a member EC as well. In fact, if you write an article for the newsletter, you get a special EC for that, too.

Remember when I said you should only use copper coins? There’s an exception to that rule. If you want to use a coin that has the same date as your special event, or vacation, then you have no choice but to use zinc. The secret is to make sure that you roll the design on the opposite side of the coin with the year on it. You also have to stain the side of the coin with the year on it, before you roll it, so that the design stands out. You’ll have to figure out what stain works best for you, and it will take some experimenting – mainly it has to be a liquid, such as shoe polish, furniture polish, or something like that, it has to coat a coin evenly, and, most important of all, it has to dry completely.

You’d be amazed at how many machines there are in the USA. There are dozens of them here in Las Vegas, where I live. Almost any tourist attraction is a potential site, as well as museums. I even saw a movie on TV once, at an aquarium, where I spotted a coin machine in the background.

Collecting elongated coins can be a lot of fun for several reasons:

• They are inexpensive
• They don’t take up much room
• They are great souvenirs
• They will ”force” you to go places you might not otherwise have visited