Canadian Roll Hunting

10 rolls of nickels...
9, 100% nickels,
6, 2006 old effigy's.

Canadian half dollars are difficult to find, because they are enduringly popular. They vanish from banks and are hoarded by everyone. I'll take any half dollars I can get in an attempt to circulate them, but so far, I've had no luck (I'm not even sure if they can be ordered).

In 1968, the voyageur dollar and half dollar were downsized, because nickel was too hard to make well-struck coins out of that were as large as the silver versions. Silver halves would never fit into a roll meant for modern halves, but this doesn't matter because they are usually found loose.

It's debatable why they are hoarded, because they never had any more silver than the other coins they circulated alongside - but theories abound. It's said that with the advent of the toonie, standard cash registers had one too few coin compartments, so the half compartment was commandeered by the toonie - others say that the half is close enough to the loonie that the most basic machines will accept 50 cents as 1 dollar, so the Bank of Canada tried to take them out of use.

There are a few great stories about loose tubs of halves and voyageur dollars being dug up and sold at face, with plenty of silver mixed in, but these are very rare.

Stopped by my favourite pickup bank and scored three nickel dollars (1980, 2x1984). I love these underappreciated coins.

Hey Mike. Good to see you started back into your cents. Unfortunately I have none on hand at the moment. I need to contact my connections and see what they have now. Out of the last batch ($276) in cents I just recently finished. I managed to pull 3 x 85 pointed 5's and 3 x 2006 NPNL Magnetic. Not to bad. I'm sitting on the 16 2006 I have on hand for a while. I have been finishing off a box of US cents I pulled from the lot and have found a couple of goodies but nothing really special. I have just a few hand fulls left of the US cents.

Hope you make a nice score in the near future. I picked up a old school microscope to use for taking closeup pics and it is working well. I like it. The USB microscope just never had the quality I wanted for pics.

That's great Tim but why do you get all the luck, If I didn't know better I'd say I was getting your left overs, but I know what you pull so no.

Picked up $50 in pennies at the bank today. Found 4 Canadian from the 40's and 13 wheat cents including a 1920, 1934D and 1945s which I didn't have. I also found a 1982 US cent which looks like some areas near the rim were Struck Through Grease.

Finally got my hands on some more nickels - $10; 5 rolls.

Rolls 1 & 2: My first-ever mint-wrapped rolls, shiny new 2013 nickels! I'm definitely going to keep them
Rolls 3, 4 & 5: Full of the nastiest, most dirt-encrusted nickels you'll ever see There are a few nickel nickels in there, but after opening them on my floor, I'm going to have to vacuum it... and I'm tempted to vacuum up the nickels as well, rather than re-roll them...