One of the popular services I created for a few Discord channels is a bot which looks up the spot prices (also known as melt values) of precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum.

As well as publishing these values each weekday morning, it also uses this data to work out the intrinsic values of dozens of different types of UK coins. This is something that is quite easy to work out with a calculator if you know what you’re doing, but it can be a bit time consuming and is prone to mistakes if you cannot remember exactly how much a certain type of coin weighs, or what proportion of each metal is in the alloy.

Take a gold sovereign, for example. It’s 7.98g of 22k gold. The intrinsic value is therefore the price-per-gram, multiplied by 7.98, multiplied by 22, divided by 24. A bit cumbersome compared with simply looking it up on this table.

Memorising the weights of all of the predecimal silver coins can also be a challenge, and an interesting thing about these is that their weights are directly proportional to their values – i.e. a sixpence weighs exactly twice as much as a threepence, a florin contains twice as much silver as a shilling, and so on. Interesting, huh?

Just for fun, the cheat sheet also shows the spot prices of copper and nickel. These are used to work out the intrinsic value of modern base metal crowns which consist of 75% copper and 25% nickel (cupro-nickel). All of these coins up until 1981 are still legal tender today and have a face value of 25p, which means their metal content is actually worth more (31p today). This is the main reason why subsequent crown coins now have a face value of £5.

If you’re not on Discord but want to have convenient access to this table of intrinsic coin values, then simply bookmark this link:

https://www.error-coins.co.uk/metalprices-cheatsheet

But remember, these are only the intrinsic values of each coin, i.e. what the raw metal is worth if you were to melt them down. It does not take into account any numismatic value that a coin may have, which could be significant, especially if it’s an error coin.

I will be taking on feedback and expanding the range of coins that are show on the webpage version of the cheat sheet, as there is more room to play with compared to a Discord message. Let me know what you.