basically I want to know if it has ever been profitable to melt down coins for material value (regardless of legality)
Edit: I have heard that it costs more to produce pennies than they are worth but I'm not sure if that cost is associated with the material cost or the manufacturing cost
Both the penny and the dime have reached higher prices than their face values at different times. This is the reason that dimes are smaller. They were shrunk to reduce the amount of silver required so that they would not exceed face value. More recently, as copper has become a more valuable resource, pennies have become more valuable than their face value, resulting in a change in the composition of pennies. They now have very little actual copper.