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A coupon is an informal term for a small sample of material, most often metal. It’s perhaps most commonly used in welding where practice welds for people first

A coupon is an informal term for a small sample of material, most often metal. It’s perhaps most commonly used in welding where practice welds for people first training to weld are done on pieces of metal often referred to as coupons. :) It is usually an artifact of materials like metal which are hard to cut, and can’t efficiently just be cut as needed during a task, but are prepared and pre-cut into small pieces you can grab easily. Each of those pieces is called a coupon. I used to store mine in a Chinese takeout container box.

greyhair 4y ago
In the mid 1970s, in my welding class, the school was located down the street from a small manufacturer that formed various metal alloys. They would provide the school with bins of scrap from their manufacturing free of charge. Those were our practice coupons in class. We had to be careful to return the welded scraps back to the proper bin so the manufacturer could recycle them. Our class was just a very small part of their recycling flow. It was a great relationship, we needed practice materials, and they hired welders.