Collecting Coins On The Cheap: The Buffalo Nickel Challenge

Nice! My best roll find was a 1919 partial date. About half of my roll find Buffaloes are 1936. I haven't found a mint-marked one in roll-searching yet.

captainfwiffo, once again I have to express my admiration for your endeavor! Good job in completing the set, especially at such a low price!

So, I have to ask, what's your next task?

I have a few ideas... I'm anxious to hear you thoughts.

Again, good job captainfwiffo! You are an inspiration to us all!

Les

I don't have any projects like this planned for the near future. I'm working on fairly ordinary collections.

I've got a Jefferson nickel set built purely from from roll hunting with 12 holes left.

I've gotten started on a couple Mercury dime sets. One is a short set (1934-1945) made up gem uncirculated, and full bands for all the dates where it's reasonable (e.g. 1945 I'll settle for partial bands because I don't want to drop 10 large on a 1945 FB dime). The other is a complete circulated set, problem-free VF-XF (mostly XF). It's already has some AU and lower-end MS coins in it, I don't know if I'll downgrade those to XF so I have a nice condition match or just keep them... I also haven't decided if I want to invest the several grand required for a VF or better 1916-D or if I'll just go for a hole-filler AG or something in between. Both of these sets are just getting started and are multi-year projects, and neither is a "el cheapo" set like this one. It is refreshing to pick out very nice looking coins for a set instead of picking out ugly ones.

In the future I want to fill a Dansco 7070 strictly with holed coins (though hopefully ones with eye appeal). I have some coins that my brother and I had picked out of the junk bin at our local coin dealer, like 3 cent silvers, Seated half dimes and dimes, etc. I also found a holed 1964 nickel while roll hunting. More modern coins might be difficult. I'd also like to build an all-holed 3 cent silver set if it can be done cheap enough.

I also want an uncirculated 20th century type set, and would like to collect silver proof sets from 1999 to present. I have part of an Indian Head cent collection from when I was a kid, I could complete that at some point... I want to do a set of walking liberties some day, and Peace dollars, and proof Mercury dimes...

Very ambitious project. I haven't found a Buffalo in a roll in over 2 years. Who's grabbing my coins ?

1913 Type 1:


I had quite a few type 1 with no mint-mark in my pile of dateless; I kept the nicest one because I had plenty if I needed to trade any.

1913 Type 2:


I found this one fairly quickly and still have some extras.

1913-D Type 1:


I kept the ugliest one that was clearly a D. I had two others, but they have been traded. I also had some type 1 that are so worn that I couldn't even recover a mint-mark with Nic-a-Date.

1913-D Type 2:


This was one of the first key dates I found. I had a much nicer one, but I traded it to fill in some later S mint holes. The mint-mark is not very clear now, but it was when I first put it in the album. Sometimes the Nic-a-Date results get less clear as the metal reoxidizes.

1913-S Type 1:


This is one of the ugliest nickels in my set but has a clear mint-mark in hand. I had three extras of this, including a pretty nice one, but I traded away the good ones.

1913-S Type 2:


The king! Again, I had two, and traded the nicer one.

No, I never want to give up the set! What I might do, if I start collecting a nicer set of Buffalo nickels, is to keep two sets in the same album, since it's big enough for four pages.

Tune in tomorrow for 1914! Which is about 40 minutes from now...

Total seed money was quite a bit more because of the coin roll hunting as any serious roll hunter can tell you. I often have two boxes of nickels in process because of my pickup/dump schedule. I usually pick up a box of dimes at the same time as my nickels, and I have a box of halves whenever I can get one (never two at once). So there are times when I have up to $1200 in cash and change sitting around my house in various boxes and piles and rolls! No you don't get to know where I live!

But only the nickels really affected the challenge, so I'll say $200 for roll hunting. Excluding that, $77.80 was all I had invested in coins at any point.

I didn't really start selling off many coins until I was done with the set, so it would be possible to get away with less seed money. You could also do away with the roll hunting (though that filled in several common later dates that don't appear often in dateless lots), or hunt with smaller quantities, like just one box, or $20 at a time or something. It might be pretty tough with a much smaller amount of seed money because you'd only be able to buy small lots of nickels which are going to cost you more per coin. You might also get stuck with a skunky lot of dateless (e.g. one where the mint-marked coins have already been picked out) that doesn't give you many goodies to sell off.

makes me want some buffalo's more and more!