So Were These Barbers Worth Getting?

Spot price is not synonymous with melt price.

Melt is the buy price of scrap, Spot is the sell price of .999 silver.

No one who wishes to stay in business will pay Spot price for scrap 90% silver. So the calculator shown does not give you melt price.

Barber halves have a Troy Ounce weight of 0.36169 troy ounces of silver. So three coins would have a Troy Ounce weight of 0.36169 * 3 or 1.08507. To use your spot price of $17.45 per Troy Ounce the three coins contain a total of (1.08507 * $17.45) $18.93 of silver.

A Barber half weighs 12.5 grams or 0.4018843 Troy ounces. As the silver content is 90% or 0.4018843 * .9 the silver content is technically 0.361696 and the copper 0.0401 (close enough, 10% of 12.5 grams in Troy ounces)

As the spot price is based on the silver content of one troy ounce of .999 silver, not the fact that it is .999 silver, where is the above calculation wrong? If, as you may be implying, we are basing the weight of the junk silver on the total coin weight and not 90% of the coin weight or, alternatively we were basing it on the avoirdupois ounce instead of the Troy ounce I would agree with you. But the above figures are accurate and I don't see how you arrive at your values

Also I checked five different sources and all define "melt value" as spot price times the weight in troy ounces. If you have a different definition can you source it?

And I am not in the silver business but if I was I would be looking to pay scrap price which as you mention is lower. Melt price is, to me, what they would reasonably sell for retail ( ebay or other source) not what a refiner would pay that is scrap price

I'd probably would have done the same thing as the OP. They aren't really in a collectable condition but the price was right so I likely would have gotten them too.

I do a lot of metal detecting and one of the places a lot of detectorists send their silver and gold finds (mainly jewelry) is Midwest Refineries. They pay 90-95% of the silver/gold value whereas most of the local jewelry stores and we buy gold places are in the 40-70% range last time I checked. Right on their home page is a box with the current spot prices with a clear indication that it is the baseline price for the percentage they pay. So when a major refinery pays a high percentage based on the spot price it is "melt" value for our purposes.

http://www.midwestrefineries.com/

From the glossary here
melt
Slang term for the intrinsic value of a particular numismatic item.

Call it closed then. I'm not sure why you raised the issue in the first place and then included the dog remark and the part about me getting bit. To issue a proactive warning to someone who had never interacted with you before seemed a bit odd to me anyway

I have been referring to "melt" value for 20 years and your the first person to ever question the definition I use. As it states on Coincommunity.com, the #1 internet based coin discussion board, it is a slang term not an official unit of measure.

Lol (slang for I laughed out loud) that was good

No hard feelings I hope? And I tend to like movies from the 30's and 40's so most things go right by me. To me George Sanders is the Saint not Roger Moore

You are correct about how much money you would make in the end. But you were VERY particular getting people to say what melt value means so that you could say they were wrong it isn't spot price. Yes it is. The refinery website says as much. They are paying 90% of the melt value. Melt or spot is the basis that all the refineries, jewelers, "we buy gold" stores, LCS's, etc. use to decide how much they will pay you for silver. Otherwise "melt" becomes a completely meaningless term as at one place melt would mean 90% of spot price while at another place it could be 40% or less. It seems like you are trying to define a term to mean something different than what virtually everyone else thinks it means.