Silvercoins, Pre-64 To Melt?

Any dime, quarter, and half dollar minted in 1964 or before is 90% silver. If they are common dates and arent in great condition they sell for their silver content.

This is how you figure how much they are worth

You take 0.715 * silver spot price (Right now its 13.84) This tells you how much each dollar face you have is worth (Right now it comes to $9.89)

By dollar face I mean $1= 4 quarters, or 2 halves, or 10 dimes.

So if you have $25 face in 90% its worth $247.25

War nickles are only 35% silver and usually sell at a discount to their melt value because its more expensive for smelters to get the silver out of them. Melt value right now is at about $0.78 each. My guess is you could get $0.65 or a little more at the current spot price.

Morgan and Peace silver dollars contain abount .77234 ounces of silver per coin. They rarely go for melt value! If they are just common dates and arent in good condition I think you could easily get $16-20 per coin.


I would defintly check out dates before you sell anything. Exspecailly the CC morgans because some of those are quite rare and bring a lot of money even in bad shape.

Some dates that come to mind are

Dimes 1916 D, 1921 D, 1921
Quarters 1932 D, 1932 S
Half dollars 1916, 1916 D, 1916 S, 1921, 1921 D, 1921 S, 1938D, 1955

There are more dates worth more than melt than that, but those are some of the dates to watch out for.

IF you have any questions feel free to email me or post on here.

offer to buy from member with less than 50 posts removed by staff ! Please review the rules !

I wish you the best of luck, and hope you get the information you came here for

Thanks everyone! Wow! Helpful! Yeah, the prominent dates are the biggest help. I was going to scan the Morgans and Peace dollars front and back this morning, and my flatbed scanner is kaput. I'm getting another tonight, and I'll scan the Halves, the silver Dollars, and quarters (I'll just fill the bed and scan them, right?) and post them. I promise, I'm no dealer, I'm just kinda stuck on what to do with all this stuff, and I'm not a little nervous about having such a portable store of value around the house. Now here you folks have instilled a little sense of guilt over the melting aspect of it all. So I'll post pics and solicit opinions, if not offers. To all that answered, many thanks.

To RGGoodie, thanks for the welcome. I find I'm not able to email back, perhaps another 50-post rule, but I appreciated the nice note nonetheless!

Melt! ::shudder::

Post your questions.. those 50 posts go quick! By the time you hit 50 though, be prepared.. you might want to keep them and add to your collection instead We're here to help!

It did... once...

Who knows in the near term? $8? $5? But in 5-10 years (long), there will definitely be a significant gain (Probably silver to around $20-24 average)

BMan, I'm in Herndon, near Dulles Airport..For what it's worth

Here are some cut-down images..Whatchall think? Melt em, or are they better than that? The couple or three CC Morgans, I'm scoping around for those now. Also, a few of these coins look "cleaner" than the others, but I did nothing to them myself. They were in a coin-book holder, pressed into the dollar-sized circles, they came out just as they are..

I find from messing with them now that they're posted, that I can save em to my desktop and then zoom them pretty effectively from there. I suppose I could do the same thing with the Walking and Franklin halves, the Washington quarters, and even the Dimes, no?



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I would imagine that all silver coins are more valuable as coins up until the point that they become unrecognizable as such. Worst case would be that you sell them for silver value, but it goes up from there, especially for Morgan dollars.