Low Grade Clad Coins?

i would agree clad is much harder then silver, also change dosent change hands like it did back in the 1800s, 1900right through the 1960s !! Now it sits in drawers jars or out of the way it dosent spend as much time in the pockets as the olden days !! Thats a little food for thought

The clad surface is cupronickel. I get 1940s nickels in circulation often enough (& generally pass them on again) to know that they're generally in pretty decent shape. Of course, part of that may be that those which aren't get pulled out for scrap, but the point is that they're long-wearing.

Besides, the '65s were made from the hubs for the silver coinage. Actually, the same basic dies seem to have been used for quite a while (look at the Bicentennial obverse), although in the mid-90s the relief drops drastically, I assume to make production go faster, or extend die life. That was a bad decision, because when you start out with a coin that's closer to flat, it's going to go flat a lot sooner. Yeah, it doesn't wear down as fast, but cupronickel doesn't anyway, & it doesn't have as far to go. (Also it's unaesthetic, like the reduced head sizes adopted about the same time.) On the other hand, Ron Landis says the newer nickels are much easier to carve into hobo nickels!

There's another factor that is much less apparent.

The old silver coins not only had a much higher velocity but they had a far lower loss rate. Many of the silver coins that were actually removed from circulation were pulled out by the FED because they were so worn. The actual numbver that were lost and stayed lost was quite low (perhaps only about 1% annually). But people are lesslikely to spend a lot of time trying to retrieve a quarter lost between their car cushions so the coin ends up being recycled with the car. Loss today can exceed 3% annually. So as a coin is used more and more extensively the odds of it being permanently lost increases. If you could look at the coins that have been lost this year you'd see they tend to be morte heavily worn than the coins in circulation. By the time any clad quarter is used for the 5,000th time it is likely to have been lost.

Another major factor that gets little attention is that people no longer carry coins in their pockets as much. Each day people tend to dump their change and then often won't have any in their pockets to clink as they work. It is in heavy physical labor that coins receive the lion's share of their wear and very few people ever do such labor any longer and those who do are less likely to have coins in their pocket. Now days most coin wear is from transportation and counting machines rather than bouncing around in workmens' pockets.

I rarely see any pre-'79 quarters in solid VF or better. If you do see one then there's a good chance it came from a mint set or is a freak that sat in a piggy bank for many years. Mint set is the better guess since strike quality of these better condition coins tends to be much better than those that are worn down (made for circulation).

A flatter coin will mean slower wear but there's a lot less design to wear off.

Coins wear from the top down in a sort of bowl shape. ie- the rim will wear a little faster than the highest point on the coin. The rim provides sacrificial metal to protect the design. You can see this especially with the '84 and '85 coins since these dates had much lower rims than other dates so finding them without wear or with luster is much more difficult.

About 55% of the oldest clad quarters and 60% of the clad dimes are gone now.

It used to seem like all the dimes and quarters were dated '65 to '67 but so many are gone and so many new coins have been minted that they aren't seen as much any longer.

One of the reasons heavily worn clad dimes aren't seen as often as quarters is that as the dimes wear they get thinner and become more likely to fit in the slot of a screw and ruined by use as a screw driver. Of course the primary reason is that dimes have a lower velocity so wear more slowly but damage from being used as a tool preferentially affects the more worn coins. To put this in perspective a roll of worn clad dimes is only about 80% the lenght of a BU roll of most dates. ie- each coin loses a lot of thickness as it wears.

Heavily worn coins are slightly more likely to be lost because they'll tend to roll farther and are very slightly more prone to fall through holes and cracks.

I think in 20 years a roll of avg circ 1969 quarters will look pretty horrid. More than a third of these early dates that survive are culls due to tarnish or damage. Nearly half are in what most people consider "uncollectible condition" already. Try finding a nice attractive '69 in F or better. You might be surprised.

The '69-D is difficult and desirable as well but despite the lower mintage is much easier to find in nice shape than the '69. There are several reasons for this but the primary one is that its scarcity was recognized early and a few pepople would set them aside. Many then got back into circulation. Also the Philly issue got into circulation very quickly, almost all were circulating by the end of 1970 but the Denver issue wasn't completely in circulation until 1975. The Denver issue is made better and has better rims protecting the design.

One of the biggest things is just that the '69 was so poorly made that many specimens just aren't attractive until they are highly worn.

Nice (XF+) Denver specimens could be found until about 1995 but I haven't seen a comparable Philly coin since about 1981. It was the first clad quarter that no longer appeared in XF in circulation. Of course individual coins don't know they can't be in circulation any longer so you can still occassionally find things that aren't supposed to be there. Some of these are mint set coins that escaped, some are from collections, and some just escaped the ravages of time under a dryer or in a piggy bank.

It's really rather remarkable that now days you can look at 45 or 50 dimes in a row that allhave a "P" or "D" mintmark. All that massive Philly mintages of '68 to '79 plus all the '65 to '67 mintages can just be swallowed up by the monstrous recent mintages and the ravages of time.

Dime attrition is likely to increase even further going forward since 10c is so little money that people won't bother to retrieve dropped coins. They'll run the vacuum over them rather than spend the time and effort to stop and pick it up.

One day they'll be recalled by the FED and most will be redeemed and melted.