Hi everybody.
I've become facinated by the common cents system and want to convert it into something a bit easier to use in my part of the world (norway to be exact). Since your "common cents" isn't as common outside the US I need to convert every measurement from cents to a currency found locally. Doing this I hope somebody can sypply me with a formula or something to convert between weight (grains/oz/grams dosn't matter) and ERN. By simply using the tables on www.common-cents.info my results will not be as accurate as I like.

Hope sombody is able and willing to help me.

You need to find something to convert the penny weight to. Grains or grams would be ideal. Each U.S. cent minted from 1996 on weighs exactly 38.61 grains.

Now, you may be looking at this backwards - if you can't get someone to obtain some post 1995 U.S. pennies for you (in which case you don't have to convert anything) then you need to take your weight reading in grains or grams and convert back to U.S. cents and apply that to the Rosetta Stone chart for your ERN.

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That is what i'm been doing so far. the problem is my coin weighs 55.56grains, and that very seldom adds up in a whole number of cents. I was hoping there was a formula or another way of converting the weight in grains directly to ERN to get the results more accurate.

You should still be able to fall directly between any two "cents" weights which would put you directly between two ERN figures. The ERN scale has pretty good resolution - the difference between say, 6.35 and 6.49 would be nil.

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Magnus - give me your address and I'll send you 100 post 1995 pennies. I've gotten a lot of good information from this forum, so I feel i can help someone else out now and then.

I think the popularity and usefulness of the CCS could result in a major disruption in the international currency exchange rates. Breaking news: post-1995 pennies are now so valuable outside the U.S. that an enterprising American rodbuilder is purchasing Norwegian smoked salmon fillets for only $1 each!

There are 15.43 grains per gram. I do all my measurments in grams. The Rosetta stone should list the weights in grams as well. HTH

No, only in cents. The purpose was to make it possible for people not to have to fool with weights and that sort of thing. That's one of the main keys to its popularity - it's simple; it doesn't require that you really learn anything new. For any system to gain widespread acceptance and use by the general fishing public, it has to be extremely simple and require very little effort.

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According to the US mint, the agency that makes the coins -- [www.usmint.gov] -- the specification weight of one US cent is 2.500 grams, which using standard conversion factors available from a variety of sources (Google is your friend) is 38.5808959 grains. This differs a bit from the the value (38.61) quoted by Dr. Hanneman, but the difference is less than 1/10 of a percent and is not significant in the application of testing rods.

Mike

Mike--

You are assuming that pennies in circulation are still mint-bright and clean. I'm guessing most pennies out there have something nasty on them that weighs about .03 grains. :)



Scott Kinney
The Longest Cast Fly Rods
[www.thelongestcast.com]

I got my new pennies from the bank, uncirculated. Ralph

If at first you don't succeed, go fishing, then try, try again.

Very interesting. I never saw that "official number." I just weighed a batch.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that as a supplier, I would never want to "short change" the government. Consequently, I would make certain that my product always weighed slightly more than the specification called for.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2005 01:32PM by Tom Kirkman.

Tom makes the argument of simplicity for sticking strictly with US cents as the measuring weight for the CC system. One reason this is valid and useful is because it limits the more obsessive among us from quoting ridiculous numbers of decimal places of precision in E.R.N. measurements. On the other hand it is clear that with the publication of the CCS Info web site, the concept is spreading around the world as Magnus's post demonstrates as do the discussions on the SexyLoops web site board. Perhaps as a result we'll see the millenium where blank makers can't afford not to state CCS values for their products. Unfortunately as Magnus notes, US one cent pieces are not readily available everywhere. Tim has generously offered to send him 100 cents. This will take a trip to the post office, customs forms, and postage to get them there, so there are limits on how often or how much this can happen. To my mind this argues for a secondary version of the Rosetta Stone with gram or perhaps 2.5 gram increments in the E.R.N. table. There are a reasons why there are international standards of weights and measures...

Mike

True, and it's a shame that the U.S. won't participate in them. Our system of weights and measures is terrible, at least if you want to converse with others in the world.

It would be a fairly simple matter to add an additional column to the Rosetta Stone chart, but the values for grams against the ERN numbers wouldn't be in whole numbers. Still, it might be worth doing. In fact I'm sure it is.

Or... somebody has found a new use for marketing U.S. cent coins around the world - weight tools for the Common Cents System.

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