Weight Tolerances For Common Junk Silver Coins?

No way a new quarter would have a +/- .19 gram tolerance. That's +/- 3%! Any AU or BU condition U.S. silver coin should (must) be within 1% of it's nominal weight or something is wrong.

The 0.715 multiplier used for average circulated 90% fractional U.S. silver backs out about 1.3% for weight loss and average circulated is unofficially considered VG average. 3% loss like you noted is commensurate with a coin grading AG3, very heavily worn.

I've bought and sold mountains of 90% silver over the last 8 years and the above comments are based on standard industry practices and my experience. Hope this helps!

Here are some of the coins in question. Please be prepared for a rather image-intensive post (and please forgive me for the blurry pictures- for some reason my camera had problems focusing on the scale.

The 1952 quarter is borderline AU/ BU, but it still seemed to be on the light side given that approximate grade: 6.14 grams.

The 1957 quarter is definitely BU, yet it weighs .13 grams less than it should when "new": 6.11/ 6.12 grams.

The 1963 quarter was the worst of the three, at 6.10 grams (characteristic of a heavily worn piece), yet it does not seem to have lost as much detail as its weight suggests: 6.10 grams.

All the pictured coins look fine.




I stand corrected. I believe tighter tolerances were actually held.

Thank you for the confirmation.




Great! Thanks for looking at them.




No worries. I knew that any amount of circulation can essentially throw existing Weight Tolerances out the window, so I've not usually as concerned with circulated junk silver that registers at all different weights.

The 3 above quarters drew my attention because they're either AU/BU (the 1952 and the 1957), or should realistically have not circulated enough to be so far under the official weight threshold (the 1963).

Sometime this weekend is fine with me; thank you in advance for your assistance.

I actually called up the U.S. Mint yesterday in an effort to get this information straight from "the source," but no one there was able to help me.

Over the course of the morning, I spoke with everyone from a call center representative to the head of the Mint's bullion division, all to no avail. I also left messages with a few more departments--such as the Mint's Freedom of Information center--as well as with their official historian, but did not receive any return calls yesterday (likely due to the holiday weekend).

Finally, as a last-ditch effort, I contacted the Smithsonian, but do not hold out much hope for a reply e-mail.

That's a pretty good deal. In my recent expeditions the avg. is 13.5x in the Indianapolis area.

Those were the days, huh? I still remember when silver was $7.00 an ounce, and common silver dollars were $7.00 each at my local coin store (something that my much less educated self didn't think made sense at the time, since they only contained 3/4 an ounce of silver).

Now, though, I lament not buying any of them! Instead, I picked up 10 Silver Eagles--my only big coin purchase back then--for $10 each a few years later, since I thought their higher silver content made them a better deal. Unfortunately, while those and silver dollars were around the same price at the time (in 2005 or 2006), the two coins have long since diverged. The value of the former continues to remain stagnant, while that of the other has shot up drastically.

I've only ever seen 90% silver resold as based on a "x face" percentage, but of course, I'm just a consumer and not a dealer.




Yes, I thought so as well. It was 12x face before this whole "silver shortage" mess started, and then when I came back into town after going on a long vacation it had increased to 12.5x face. I figured that was still better than anyone else (I've seen as high as 15.6x face during trips to local coin stores), so I've been picking up as much junk silver as I can afford.




Thank you for the verification; I greatly appreciate you looking up the tolerances for me. That would definitely mean all of the coins in question fall within the permitted Weight Tolerance. Perhaps the tolerances for the quarter and half-dollar were increased once mintages started getting ramped up in the post-World War II era?

That I do not know. Perhaps it was related to the dime's small size (as in, there was less "wiggle room" for the Mint to work with)? Even an underweight quarter or half-dollar would still be above 6 grams and 12 grams, respectively, but the silver missing from an underweight dime would be much more noticeable if it ever came to weighing it.

I seem to recall reading, too, that during the period of silver coinage, the dime was essentially the economy's equivalent of the quarter today. This would mean that it would be the denomination people would inherently place the most trust in, since they would deal in/ with it more often.