The Cent That Wouldn't Ring: Testing Copper by Sound at Fort Wilkins
Dr. G. G. Wilkins drops coins on his anvil to show how an 1860s counterstamper told an old pure-copper large cent from the new copper-nickel cent, the 1864 bronze cent and a dull-thudding cast counterfeit. He also explains how the same ring test told him whether a sheet of copper was sound before he paid for it to build a still. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance brings new stories about a lead dollar, his granny's jar-flicking, a revenue man rapping walls, and an uncle who ran his still by ear. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then takes apart the old habit of biting a coin to test it.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Hush that rattling, you overstuffed sofa with teeth. You've been gnawing that chain since sunup like a deacon chewing on a sermon he don't believe. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There's a ladle of molasses in it for you if you quit your groaning before the folks at home think I'm butchering a cow in here.
♦ Bear huffs, chain slides through the dirt, a heavy body drops against the log wall
Wilkins: Good bear. Four hundred pounds of good bear, anyhow, and maybe ten pounds of it is manners.
♦ A single copper cent dropped onto an anvil face, a warm, clear ring that fades slowly
Wilkins: Hear that? That's a sound I'd put up against any church bell in Merrimack County. Hold that note in your ear, friends. Before the night's out I'll teach you what it means, and what it means when you don't hear it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Behind me the still is ticking, Barnaby's sulking, the anvil's warm, and in my vest pocket I've got a fistful of pennies that are about to get a hard drop and an honest hearing. Tonight's episode is called The Cent That Wouldn't Ring. It's about copper, and about how a man with nothing but an anvil and a good ear can tell honest metal from a lie.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A still is only as honest as the copper it's made of. That's why the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. See it now at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
♪ A short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Where the copper came from, and why the cent changed its coat.
Wilkins: Sit close, because this is a history lesson and I don't want to give it twice. My voice gets tired, and Barnaby takes repetition as an insult.
♦ Coins jingling as a hand digs into a leather purse
Wilkins: I'm laying four coins on the anvil. First is an old large cent, big as a pocket watch and near enough pure copper, 168 grains of it. Our fathers carried these from the 1790s onward. They were so heavy a man with a dollar's worth of them walked lopsided and his trousers sat at half-mast. Congress got tired of minting a coin that cost nearly what it was worth, and in 1857 they killed the large cent and the half cent along with it. No funeral, no hymn. A piece of paper, and that was that.
Wilkins: Second is the little Flying Eagle that replaced it. It's no longer pure copper. They mixed in nickel, about eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel, and cut the weight to 72 grains, less than half. Folks called them nicks and white cents, because they come out pale as a Portsmouth banker who's just seen the ledger. In '59 they put an Indian on the face and kept the same metal.
Wilkins: Here's the joke Washington played on itself. Copper-nickel is HARD. The coiners at the Philadelphia Mint struck it, and it fought back. It wore out their dies something terrible, and half the cents came out mushy with the feathers barely showing. That makes it the only thing in Washington that ever wore out a government man.
♦ Coin slid across anvil
Wilkins: Third is brand new, from 1864. Congress dropped the nickel and made the cent bronze, ninety-five parts copper with five of tin and zinc, at 48 grains. That's a third the weight of Grandpa's big copper. The same year they gave us a bronze two-cent piece. And the same year they finally stomped on the fourth coin I've got here.
Wilkins: This one's a Civil War token. Back in '62, when folks hoarded every coin in their mattresses, every shopkeeper from Manchester to Milwaukee had copper tokens struck with his name, his trade and some patriotic slogan. Millions of them, all passing as cents. It got so you could buy a pound of nails with a coin that advertised a saloon in Cincinnati. In 1864 Congress outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces. Now, a man who stamps his own name on coins listens to news like that very careful. I'll get to my own anvil work by and by.
Wilkins: Let me throw in one more for the scholars. Back in 1837, a New York druggist and metal man named Lewis Feuchtwanger struck his own cents in German silver, a nickel alloy. He begged Congress to coin the whole country's change in it. They told him no, then twenty years later did nearly what he'd said and never sent him a thank-you note. That's how government works. They steal your idea, ruin it, and fine you for the original.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Now, where does copper come from for a man in Pittsfield? In my granddaddy's day it was old ship sheathing, worn-out kettles and whatever the Boston scrap men would sell. Lately it's coming out of the far north, the Keweenaw country on Lake Superior up in Michigan. They've found copper there lying in the ground pure as a wedding ring, in lumps so big men cut them up with chisels for days. Since the canal and locks at the Sault opened in '55, that copper comes down the lakes by boat, goes east by rail and water to the rolling mills, and the Revere mill in Canton, Massachusetts, rolls it into sheet.
Wilkins: Yes, that Revere. Paul Revere, the midnight-riding silversmith, opened the first copper rolling mill in this country at Canton in 1801. He rolled the copper for the State House dome in Boston and sheathed the bottom of Old Ironsides with it. So when I tell you my still has patriotic blood, I mean the metal came off the same rolls that dressed the Constitution's bottom. I can't say that much for the bottoms of most Concord politicians, which are dressed in nothing but excuses.
Wilkins: From Canton the sheet goes up the rails to Concord, then by wagon up the turnpike past Epsom. Every teamster on Route 28 knows a load of copper sheet by the way the wagon sings over the frost heaves. It rattles like a tinker's funeral. When I hear that, I go out to meet it, and I bring my knuckles. I'll tell you why after the next segment.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and plucky
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws and a bad penny.
Wilkins: Here's the test, plain as I can put it. Drop a struck coin on a hard anvil face and it RINGS. The die pressed that metal tight, every grain packed against the next, and the whole coin shivers like a little bell. A CAST counterfeit is another animal. The crook pours his metal into a sand or plaster mold, and he usually uses lead or pewter because it's cheap and melts on a kitchen fire. Cast metal is full of pores and bubbles, little caves inside the coin. Drop it and it don't sing. It goes TUCK, like a toad landing on a church step. Listen.
♦ Large cent dropped on anvil, warm ring
Wilkins: That's honest copper. A little soft and mellow, because copper's a forgiving metal, and this one's been worn smooth by fifty years of pockets.
♦ Copper-nickel cent dropped on anvil, a higher, brighter, longer ring
Wilkins: Hear the difference? Higher and longer, with a little silver in the voice. Harder metal rings higher and holds its note longer. That's the white cent.
♦ Bronze cent dropped on anvil, a clean ring between the two
Wilkins: There's the new bronze, sitting between them like a middle child. And now the villain.
♦ A dull, flat thud, a short wobble, then silence
Wilkins: TUCK. Like a Concord alderman's speech: a thud, a wobble and not one note of truth. That's a cast lead cent with a copper wash on it. And here's the story of how I came to own it.
♦ Wax crackle, Barnaby grunts in the distance
Wilkins: Two summers back, a peddler come up the turnpike from Lowell in a yellow wagon, selling needles, ribbon, liniment and a hair restorer that smelled like a horse's armpit. He paid for a jar of my best with a stack of cents. The minute he turned his back I rang them on the anvil, one after another. Ring, ring, ring, TUCK, TUCK, ring, TUCK. Seven bad ones in twenty. Bold as a rooster in a henhouse.
Wilkins: I called after him, and he took off running, and it was the worst choice a man has made in Pittsfield since the fellow who tried to court the Methodist minister's widow on the same afternoon he buried his own wife. He cut across my yard to save time and stepped inside the circle of Barnaby's chain.
♦ A sudden bear roar, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Friends, I've pulled four thousand teeth and heard every noise a man can make in a dentist's chair. This peddler invented a new one. It started as a whistle and ended as a sound like a church organ falling down the stairs. Barnaby took him by the seat of his britches, tore the wool clean off him, and got a good two inches of the meat underneath. The tearing sounded like a wet boot pulled out of April mud. He came over my fence with his hindquarters showing white as a fresh-scraped hog and bleeding like a stuck Christmas goose. Every step he took left a red print in the dust from Wilkins Corner nearly to the Barnstead line. He's the only man in Merrimack County who got a cheap shave and a free bleeding off the same set of teeth.
Wilkins: And his purse? It fell in the dirt, and Barnaby gobbled it whole, coins and all, before I could get a stick to him. I'll tell you what a man does when his bear has swallowed money. He waits. He watches. And for six days he walks out every morning with a manure fork and a stout constitution. Friends, I combed through that bear's leavings like a prospector at Sutter's mill. I recovered every honest copper cent, polished brighter than the Philadelphia Mint ever sent them out. A bear's gut will scour copper better than any vinegar and salt. The lead ones never came back. He kept them. Even a bear knows trash when he swallows it. Mind you, a bear with lead in his belly is a sick bear, and I fed him nothing but greens and milk till I was sure he'd come through. Barnaby may be my watchdog, but he's no garbage barrel.
♦ Bear grunts, low and contented
Wilkins: You hear that? He remembers. He's proud of it.
Wilkins: You know I've been taken in by the Merrimack County sheriff twice now. Both times, the deputy who came for me emptied my coin box onto the table as evidence. The second time, I asked him kindly if I might ring the evidence. He let me, mostly out of curiosity. Two of those coins thudded. They were bad. And they weren't my coins. The deputy had tossed in his own pocket change to make the pile look grander for the magistrate. So the county was paying its deputy in bad coin, which is the only honest description of what a deputy is worth. I got arrested twice, and both times the sheriff checked my coins for counterfeits and never once checked his own conscience.
♦ Steel punch set on a coin, hammer blow, a bright clang
Wilkins: That's my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going into a cent. Here's why I ring every cent before I stamp it. If I put my name on a lead coin, I've signed a lie. And a cracked coin, even an honest copper one, will split right in two under the punch. A cracked cent rings dull too, so the anvil tells me before the hammer does. A man and his coin are judged the same way: drop him on something hard and listen for whether he rings or just lies there.
Wilkins: Speaking of men who ring true, I've got a guest tonight who came a long, crooked way to sit on my nail keg. He's from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he's got an ear as good as any I know. Friends, this is Junior Vance.
Junior: Evenin', Doc. Your bear looked at me through that window like I was a pork chop that owed him money.
Wilkins: He looks at the Methodist choir the same way, Junior. Don't take it personal. Now, you heard my cents sing. Did anybody down your way ever try passing you bad money?
Junior: Yessir, once, and only once. A buyer in Charlotte paid me off one night with a fistful of paper and one big silver dollar on top, like he was doin' me a favor. Shiny as a Sunday shoe. Next morning I'm in the feed store payin' for chicken scratch, and I drop that dollar on the marble counter.
♦ A dull thunk on stone
Junior: That's the noise it made. Just like that. Old man behind the counter didn't even look up. He says, son, that ain't a dollar, that's a sinker. Lead, with a silver wash on it thin as a preacher's patience. I nailed it over my front door, and it's still up there. The only honest thing that buyer ever gave me was a lesson, and he made it out of lead.
Wilkins: You should've fed it to a bear, Junior. I hear they're particular.
Junior: I heard. I'll keep my distance from your fork, Doc.
Wilkins: Ha! What about glass? A runner's only as good as what he carries his goods in.
Junior: Now that's my granny. Before she'd let a drop go in a fruit jar, she'd hold it up to the lamp and flick it with her fingernail. A good jar says ting, clear as a little bell. A jar with a hairline crack you can't even see says tunk, and you throw it on the trash heap. She'd stand there flickin' jars like a woman tunin' a fiddle, ting, ting, ting, tunk, and that one'd go sailin' out the back door.
Wilkins: A sensible woman. Did you listen to her?
Junior: Every time but once. I was in a hurry, filled a jar that never got its flick, and set it in my lap on a washboard road. Two miles on it split down the side and emptied itself right into my britches. I smelled like a tent revival for a week. Two preachers tried to save me just from the scent. And I promise you, Doc, a man doesn't truly know where all his tender parts are till he's soaked them in a full jar of the strong stuff and has to keep sittin' on 'em for ten more miles.
Wilkins: I've treated that complaint, Junior. A dentist sees all kinds of trouble. Mostly I prescribe silence and standing up.
Junior: I stood up for three days.
Wilkins: Now, the revenue men use their knuckles too, don't they?
Junior: They surely do. There was one in particular, long and skinny as a fence rail, and he'd go along a smokehouse wall rappin' every board, listenin' for a hollow. My cousin had a cache built in behind the wall. But he'd stuffed every gap around the jars with feed sacks so tight that when you knocked on it, it went thud, solid as a stump. So this agent raps his way down the wall, thud, thud, thud, and keeps goin' right on by. Then he gets to an honest wall at the end, just plain boards, and it goes BONG, hollow as a drum.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Junior: Oh yes. A whole nest of yellow jackets lived in that wall, the size of a bushel basket. That fool pulls out his pry bar, grinnin' like he just found the Lost Dutchman, and he pops that board loose. Doc, I never saw a government man move that fast before or since. He ran into the creek with his hat full of wasps. He found the wasps and missed the whiskey, so I reckon he got stung twice that afternoon.
♦ Wilkins slaps the anvil, laughing
Wilkins: That's the best use of a hollow wall I've heard since the Pittsfield selectmen built the new town hall. Last one, Junior. You ever listen to a still?
Junior: My Uncle Doyle never looked at a thermometer in his life. He ran by ear. The thumper starts slow and deep, like a bass drum at a funeral. As she warms up it picks up quicker and higher, till it sounds like a heartbeat after a long run. He could sit on a stump twenty feet off, whittlin', and tell you exactly where the run stood. And he told me the one thing that scares a still man most is when it goes QUIET. Quiet means your fire's gone out, or something's plugged up and pressure's buildin' where it shouldn't. He'd say a still that's quiet is a still that's fixin' to kill you. Never walk off from one that's runnin'. Not for a nap, not for supper, not for a pretty girl.
Wilkins: He was right, every word. A plugged still is a bomb with a copper hat on, and a fire left alone burns more than mash. Junior Vance, from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County. Thank you, sir. You ring true.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Tell your bear I said goodnight from a safe distance.
♪ Fiddle reel, rising
♦ Wax crackle
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and lend me your ears! You've heard the Doctor's anvil tonight, and you know an honest metal SINGS! Well, friends, listen to this. If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It's engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper. That isn't scrap or salvage or a peddler's patched-up kettle. It's bright, refined, honest copper that would ring sweet as a church bell on any anvil in New England! It's fitted with precision CNC-machined brass unions, tight and true, and the Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional distillation demonstrations! For only eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars, you get a flagship still built to be passed down to your grandchildren, not carted off to the junk man! So don't delay, friends. Go to moonshinestill.com and order your Flame-Flow today! That's moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Or come see it in person at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the copper is pure and the bear is chained. One more time: moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo flourish
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: Now I promised you I'd tell you what my knuckles are for. When that wagonload of Canton sheet comes rattling up the turnpike, I don't pay a penny until I've given each sheet a hearing. Here's how. Have the teamster or the merchant hold the sheet up by one corner, or hang it from a rafter on a loop of cord so nothing's touching it but air. Then rap it smartly near the middle with your knuckle, or better, a little wooden mallet.
♦ A large hanging copper sheet struck with a mallet, a long, shimmering wobble-tone
Wilkins: That's a sound sheet. It sings all over, and the note shimmers and dies away slow and even. Now listen to this one.
♦ Another sheet struck, a buzzing rattle and a quick dead stop
Wilkins: You hear that buzz, like a hornet caught in a stovepipe? That's a lamination. Somewhere back in the rolling, a bit of dross or a gas bubble got pressed flat inside the metal, and the sheet split into two layers you can't see from the outside. Two pieces of copper pretending to be one, like a Concord marriage. You build a still out of that and the first time you hammer the seam, or heat it a hundred times, that hidden split opens up, and you've got a leak where the vapor comes out. And vapor, friends, is fire waiting for a spark. A crack anywhere in the sheet will cut the ring short the same way. So I rap every sheet, top, middle and bottom, and any merchant who won't let me rap his copper is like a horse trader who won't let you look in the horse's mouth. I've pulled enough teeth to know what that means.
Wilkins: Now here's the dentist's secret, and it's a real one. Doctors have been tapping on folks for near a hundred years. A Viennese physician named Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper, and he watched his father knock on wine casks to tell how full they were. In 1761 he published a book on tapping a man's chest the same way. A sound lung booms, and a chest full of fluid thuds like a full cask. I tap teeth the same way. A tooth gone bad at the root is tender to the knock, and a tap with the handle of my mirror tells me which molar a man's lying about. So whether it's coin, copper, cask or jaw, the honest article answers you if you knock on it.
♦ Hammer on copper, rhythmic planishing, the tone climbing higher over several blows
Wilkins: Now listen to this. I'm raising a still dome on the stake anvil, and you can hear the note climb as I hammer. That's copper work-hardening. Every blow stiffens it, and the ring goes from mellow to bright to downright squeaky. Copper hardens under the hammer the way a bachelor hardens under advice: the more you strike him, the stiffer and squeakier he gets, until he cracks. When the ring gets tinny and hard, STOP. Put it in the forge, bring it to a dull cherry red, and it goes soft as butter again. You can quench it in the water bucket or leave it to cool on the bench, it's the same to copper. That's the opposite of steel, which goes hard when you quench it. Many a blacksmith ruins his first still by treating copper like a horseshoe.
Wilkins: Now, what's the copper for? It isn't for looks. Copper takes the sulfur stink out of the vapor, the rotten-egg and boiled-cabbage stench. And here's the fine point most men miss. The cleanup happens in the VAPOR. Copper sitting at the bottom of the pot under the boiling wash does little. Copper in the helmet, the vapor pipe and the worm, where the hot vapor rubs past bright metal, does most of the work. If you skimp anywhere, don't skimp on the parts the steam touches.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Let me walk you through a run of old-fashioned New England cider brandy, the way our grandfathers made it in Epsom and Chichester before anybody thought to tax it. I'm telling it for history, so listen the way you'd read a book.
Wilkins: Step one: grind your apples, press out the cider, and put it in clean barrels in a cellar that stays cool but not freezing. Leave the bung loose so the gas can get out. Wild yeast on the skins will start the work, and in a few weeks the sweetness is gone and you've got hard cider, dry and sharp.
Wilkins: Step two: draw the clear cider off the muck at the bottom, the lees. If you boil that sludge it scorches and gives the spirit a burnt taste you'll never get out.
Wilkins: Step three: fill the pot no more than three quarters full, so it can't foam up into the vapor pipe and plug it. Seal the joints with a flour-and-water paste, never with anything that holds lead. Bring the fire up gentle. A low fire makes a sweet spirit, and a hot fire makes a man run for the water bucket. The first run takes it all through quickly, and what comes out is called low wines. Then you clean the pot and run those low wines a second time, slow, and that's the run where you make your cuts.
Wilkins: Now the safety, and I'm dead serious. Apples are full of pectin, the stuff that makes jelly set, and pectin makes MORE methanol in fermentation than corn or rye ever will. Methanol is wood alcohol. It blinds and kills. It comes off heaviest in the first runnings. So on an apple run you throw away the first of it, the foreshots, without a second's pity, and you're generous about it. Then you catch the rest in a row of small jars, numbered in order, so you can judge each one. The next jars after the foreshots are the heads. They smell like a shoemaker's glue pot or a varnish can. Drink them and you'll be stuck to the floor for a week and blind to the bill. They go in the waste too. Then the smell turns clean and fruity and the spirit goes smooth on the tongue. Those are the hearts, the only part worth keeping. As the run goes on, the jars start smelling like a wet dog and turning oily and cloudy. Those are the tails, so you stop, and they're set aside.
Wilkins: And fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air, and it creeps along the floor looking for your flame. Keep the receiving jars well away from the firebox. Never fill or empty the pot near an open flame. Keep a bucket of sand by the door, and never, as Junior's Uncle Doyle said, walk away from a running still.
Wilkins: And now the plain truth: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is history and education, nothing more.
♪ A slow fiddle interlude
♦ Wax crackle, a click and whir as a voicemail cylinder begins to play
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and the mailbag. We've got a cylinder in the call-in box from a long way south. Let's hear it.
♦ Tinny playback, rural background noise, a rooster far off
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Playback clicks off, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I've heard of your uncle without ever meeting him. Every county in this Republic has one. Let me take your question in two pieces, ashes first and then the oak.
Wilkins: The ashes. What your uncle is shaking out of his stove is POTASH, the same stuff New England was built on. When our grandfathers cleared this valley, they burned whole hillsides of maple and beech and leached the ash for potash to sell in Boston for soap and glass. The very first patent this country ever granted, signed in 1790, went to a man named Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash and pearl ash. So your uncle comes from a noble trade. But potash is an alkali, a lye. Put a pinch in a sour wash and it might soften some of the vinegar bite. That's as far as it goes. It doesn't touch methanol, it doesn't make bad heads good, and in a thump keg it's just mud. Your uncle's ashes are the same potash my grandfather sold for soap, and I have never known soap to make a bad run honest. It barely keeps a Barnstead man honest on bath day.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak, and here's a cooper's secret. Red oak is open-pored, like a sponge with ambition. Make a barrel of it and fill it with spirit and it'll weep through the staves like a widow at a wake. That's why every tight whiskey barrel is white oak. White oak grows little natural plugs in its pores that seal it. Coopers save red oak for dry goods like flour and nails. Red oak shavings in the thump keg add color, tannin and a bitter pucker. A harsh spirit tastes different afterward, so a man THINKS it's cleaner. It isn't. It's a bad spirit wearing a red coat. Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is a red oak barrel's whole life story: it leaks, it puckers, and it pretends it's doing a job. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is throwing the bad heads AWAY.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, you're a fine listener and a fair-minded nephew, and I'm stamping a cent in your honor right now. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., with a little scratch on the reverse for Wilkesboro. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep his ashes for the garden, where they belong.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Now one more myth, because it's a dentist's grief and it fits tonight's subject. Men BITE coins to test them. You've seen it. A man takes a gold piece, puts it between his back teeth, and chomps down like he's in a tavern fight. The notion is that gold is soft and takes a tooth mark, so a mark proves it's real.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Bosh. Lead is soft too, softer than gold. A lead slug with a gold wash takes a fine tooth mark, so the bite test will happily call a lead fake gold. And bite a hard coin, like one of those copper-nickel cents, and you'll crack the molar clean down the middle. I've pulled more molars cracked by coin-biting than by Barnaby, and Barnaby has bitten more men. A cracked molar has to come out in pieces, friends. I take a forceps to each shard while the man grips the arm of the chair and makes a noise like a pig caught in a gate. There's blood down his shirt front and a tooth that crunches like rock candy. All so he could test a coin he could have dropped on a counter for free. A man who bites a gold piece to test it is testing his teeth, not the gold, and the teeth lose every time.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Drop it, don't bite it. Weigh it on a good scale if you've got one. An honest coin weighs what the Mint says it weighs, and a fake one nearly never does. Listen for the ring. Your ears are free, and they don't crack.
♪ Theme begins softly beneath
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper that rings true from dome to worm. Order yours at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's anvil work made you hungry to learn the craft properly, from the copper to the cuts, from history to the hearts, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read your copper, read your run and read your own foolishness before it reads you. It's for history and education, done the honest way, with every safety lesson and no shortcuts. Ask about it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or look for it alongside the stills at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance for coming all the way up from the Brushy Mountains, to Rabbit Miller for his question, and to Barnaby for keeping the yard free of peddlers, lead pennies and deputies. And thank you all for listening.
♦ A single large cent dropped on the anvil, its warm ring fading slowly
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar