Weight of 7 million, Re Better Call Saul

Joined
Feb 15, 2006
Messages
1,620
Reaction score
1,479
Location
Wellington FL Aberdeen NC
Just watched the latest episode, poor Saul and Mike had a rough time dragging 7 mil out of the desert. I started wondering just how much weight each one of those bags of hundreds would have weighed so I did some calculations. I have it on good authority that $10,000 in crisp new 100's weights 3.57 ounces. Some old school math, carry the one, etc says that 350 such bricks would weigh just a tad over 78 pounds! And Saul had two bags! I don't think he would have done as well as the episode portrayed.
 
Register to hide this ad
Thread drift: My wife's first cousin was a 18 wheeler owner/driver and had a load from the Denver mint, 67,000 pounds of pennies! It made his GVW several thousand over weight. He would pull into a interstate weigh station and all the alarms would go off! He would smile and hand them his bill of lading and they would just wave him on!

When we did the math, 67,000 pounds of pennies was about $62,000 and the value of the metal was about $63,000. A penny wasn't worth the metal it was made from!

Ivan
 
BTW, the next episode will be the season finale of BCS. I've also heard that the next season will be the last.

Too bad. Great acting from superb stars. My wife and I will miss it.

John
 
I don't remember the weight now, but through the 80s/90s Mexican cartels only weighed cash - bundles of US $100 bills, 50 to a bundle, bound fore and aft with two (no more) #3 rubber bands. At the time it was easy to track all high capacity bill-counting machines through the maintenance contracts, and weighing the cash was extremely accurate.
 
Last edited:
Money weight calculator

Money weight calculator: Money Weight Calculator

Weight is determined by the number of bills needed to represent a specific value. Total value has nothing to do with the weight!

Follow the link and see.
 
Last edited:
A $100 bill weights 1 gram. There are 28.35 grams to an oz 28X16=448 or $44,800 so about 22.2# to the million

A million in $100 bills weighs 22.2#. 7 mill would be #155.4

A billion is 22,200# 2 Billion is 44,400# and the weight capacity of a normal semi trailer

A trillion is 1000 billion or 500 semi loads

Between 2004-2016 the country went in the hole 4,300 semi loads.
537.5 semi loads a year

Between 2016-2020 3,350 semi loads
837.5 loads a year

2021 year only 750 loads

Now you know the real reason for the toilet paper shortage
 
Last edited:
Thread drift: My wife's first cousin was a 18 wheeler owner/driver and had a load from the Denver mint, 67,000 pounds of pennies! It made his GVW several thousand over weight. He would pull into a interstate weigh station and all the alarms would go off! He would smile and hand them his bill of lading and they would just wave him on!

When we did the math, 67,000 pounds of pennies was about $62,000 and the value of the metal was about $63,000. A penny wasn't worth the metal it was made from!

Ivan
About pennies....

When copper prices spike, pennies are worth, well, more than a penny BUT it had to be a copper penny. In 1982, the US began switching the composition of pennies from copper plachettes to plated zinc and from 1983 and up, all pennies are made of that composition. So if you want to save pennies for their copper content, 1981 and earlier along with most 1982 pennies should be your target.
 
Right now a nickel is worth about 15 cents as bullion. It became illegal to melt the after 2007 when they were worth about 7.5

I melted a lot of them and added zinc to make nickle silver bars for knife guards etc. prior to that. Nickle silver is 60% copper, 20% copper and 20% zinc. NO silver

You have to get the nickels up to about 2400f to melt them BTW
 
Used to work across from the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, and they would give out shredded money as souvenirs to people that took the tour.


Sent from my motorola one 5G using Tapatalk
 
Right now a nickel is worth about 15 cents as bullion. It became illegal to melt the after 2007 when they were worth about 7.5

I melted a lot of them and added zinc to make nickle silver bars for knife guards etc. prior to that. Nickle silver is 60% copper, 20% copper and 20% zinc. NO silver

You have to get the nickels up to about 2400f to melt them BTW


Don't you mean 60% NICKEL, 20% copper and 20% zinc. NO silver
 
Don't you mean 60% NICKEL, 20% copper and 20% zinc. NO silver

No, nickel silver is 20% nickel, 60% copper and 20% zinc. Those may vary a bit but usually within about 2% of those. If you melted 10# of nickels you would have 2.5# of nickel and 7.5# of copper so adding about 2.5# of zinc will put you right in the ball park. Easy to machine and keeps a nice silver color.

I still have about 30# of the stuff in 1x1x4 bars. Made my smelter out of an old propane tank, top has a hole in it and hinges off, it is lined it with refractory cement and a weed burner goes in a side hole. What ever I want to melt goes in a clay graphite crucibles. Aluminum, copper, brass. etc. Pour into casting sand molds. Those all melt before 1600f

A Modern Nickel is 25% nickel and 75% copper during WWII they were 56% copper, 35%, silver, and 9% manganese.

Recently nickel hit $100,000 per metric ton. That is about $45 a lb. There are 91 nickels in a pounds so just the 1# of nickel in 4# or 364 nickels ($18.20) is worth $45. Copper is about 1/10 of nickel so the 3# of copper in 4# of nickels is worth about $12 $57 total bullion value for $18.20 of coin.
 
Last edited:
Right now a nickel is worth about 15 cents as bullion. It became illegal to melt the after 2007 when they were worth about 7.5

I melted a lot of them and added zinc to make nickle silver bars for knife guards etc. prior to that. Nickle silver is 60% copper, 20% copper and 20% zinc. NO silver

You have to get the nickels up to about 2400f to melt them BTW
Nickels made in 1942 through 1944 did have silver content, due to war shortages of nickel.

An enterprising counterfeiter around that time got a hold of a set of worn dies, a 1944 obverse (front die) and an earlier 1938 reverse (back die). He had a vending machine route to help explain turning in large numbers of nickels. He was tripped up by three things: his nickels contained no silver, they all looked worn due to the state of the dies he was using, and most telling, the silver war nickels all had large mint marks located above Monticello on the reverse side of the coin. Because his reverse die came from 1938, it had no mint mark, so neither did any of his 1944 counterfeit nickels. The Secret Service arrested him but no one is sure how many counterfeit nickels he put into circulation. They are an interesting collector item but technically illegal to own, being they are counterfeit.
 
Back
Top