Vintage Stills from the old country

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Grappa-Gringo
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Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by Grappa-Gringo »

Visited the homeland and had taken these photos...forgot to post them.
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by googe »

Love the first one!, I'm confused with what it is though, looks like the lymearm going into the column?, like the last one tic, dunno what the drums doing though, is it a cooler?. Thanks for sharing :thumbup:
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by BigSwede »

Copper porn! I wish I had got into this a decade ago, before copper prices went insane.

There are people right now making copper penny separation machines. Very clever stuff. They feed in loose pennies, and it separates those that are pure copper from the newer ones that are mostly zinc. Apparently, the copper pennies in the USA are now worth more than their face value.
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by rad14701 »

BigSwede wrote:Copper porn! I wish I had got into this a decade ago, before copper prices went insane.

There are people right now making copper penny separation machines. Very clever stuff. They feed in loose pennies, and it separates those that are pure copper from the newer ones that are mostly zinc. Apparently, the copper pennies in the USA are now worth more than their face value.
If memory serves me correctly, it costs in the range of $0.021 to produce even a new copper plated zinc penny... Never weighed a pure copper penny to figure out what they might be worth...
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by Prairiepiss »

If I was a guessing man. I would say the first one was some sort of gin or absenth still. But who knows?

Cool stuff. Thanks for sharing.
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by blind drunk »

I'm gunna go out on a limb a say it's a grappa still.
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by Prairiepiss »

blind drunk wrote:I'm gunna go out on a limb a say it's a grappa still.
I think your guess is better.
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by Grappa-Gringo »

they were all inside the Poli Distillery in Bassano del Grappa, Italy...
here's a link http://www.poligrappa.com/eng/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow
my father was caught by Germans and was to be hung in Bassano. The trees are still up in the road
where some of his mates were hung right infront of him. Luckily for him, they ran out of trees to hang people
and he marched onwards....
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by Soggy Bottom Boy »

BigSwede wrote:Copper porn! I wish I had got into this a decade ago, before copper prices went insane.

There are people right now making copper penny separation machines. Very clever stuff. They feed in loose pennies, and it separates those that are pure copper from the newer ones that are mostly zinc. Apparently, the copper pennies in the USA are now worth more than their face value.
I seriously doubt that there are any pure copper pennies in circulation to find, unless they are from a stolen collection that some junkie spent at the cigarette shop. The last pure copper pennies were minted in 1857, that's the year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty Seven. Pennies from that era that are rated as in "good" to "extra-fine" condition are worth anywhere from $15 to $64 each. (an uncirculated 1956 Flying Eagle penny is worth about $10,500.00)

There are probably quite a lot of 95% copper pennies, from 1981 and a little older, still in circulation though, but I imagine they are being collected as you say, and dwindling fast.

U.S. penny composition over the years:

1793–1796 100% copper
1796–1857 100% copper
1856–1864 88% copper, 12% nickel (also known as NS-12)
1864–1942 "bronze" (95% copper, 5% tin and zinc)
1943 zinc-coated steel (also known as 1943 steel cent)
1944–1946 "brass" (95% copper, 5% zinc)
1946–1962 "bronze" (95% copper, 5% tin and zinc)
1962–1981 "brass" (95% copper, 5% zinc)
1982 varies: "brass" (95% copper, 5% zinc) or copper-plated zinc (97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper)
1983–present 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (core: 99.2% zinc, 0.8% copper; plating: pure copper)
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by BigSwede »

^^ another way to look at it, then, is any USA pre 1981 penny is 95% copper... good enough for me!

It's similar to silver in that any dimes, quarters, halves pre-1964 are Ag-based, and of course are worth waaaaay more today for their Ag content than face value. They are long gone from circulation.

It makes me wonder, in 1969, did smart people start saving their silver change and replace it with the current clad coinage? If so, it would have been a nice investment. The problem with doing it with pennies is the margin is so low. eBay has machines to separate Cu pennies from zinc, but IIRC they run about $500. You'd need to save a freakish amount of Cu pennies just to pay for the machine.

Back OT: I'm still trying to figure out what the picture is of the two (looks like brass) tubes angled into the top of an open oak barrel, then terminating just hanging in space. Is it some sort of thumper or maybe a scum-catcher with the top off? We can't see what the pipes into the barrel do... continue straight on, or maybe drop down? They look to go straight through. Almost like a crude heat exchanger or a badly designed condenser. And why two pipes?
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Re: Vintage Stills from the old country

Post by MichiganCornhusker »

Grappa-Gringo wrote:my father was caught by Germans and was to be hung in Bassano. The trees are still up in the road
where some of his mates were hung right infront of him. Luckily for him, they ran out of trees to hang people
and he marched onwards....
holy shit.
Shouting and shooting, I can't let them catch me...
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