Workflow For "Processing" My Lincoln Wheat Cents (Noobie)

Hey, so after reading up on here and asking some questions and getting some answers I've started to sort my wheat pennies for filling out my Three "Coin Collector" Albums purchased from Wizard Coin Supply.

So I have about 300-400 LWCs I divided into sandwich baggies:

-Red, XF/AU/BU (only a few of the late dates)
-Problem free with exception for teeny amounts of gunk or scratches or whatever
- "X" has corrosion or verdigris or other green crap but is minimal
- "XX" has worse verdigris
- "XXX" is corroded past help
- Damaged or cull (holes, clips, deep scratches etc)
-Cleaned. Had trouble with this, had a lot of dates from the Teens that were very worn but had bright obverses and dull reverses, look like they were cleaned and retoned, or rubbed with an eraser. They just don't look natural. I'msure some of ones in my problem free bag are cleaned but I'mnot an expert at telling yet!

So I started with my BU/Problem free bag and just started filling in Coin Collector album One. I really couldn't bring myself to acetone bathe/verdi-care all these common cents and doing it to hundreds of pennies was daunting so all the good coins I had, just went straight into Album #1 which will ultimately be my 'trash' album that will hold cents that could possibly be contaminated. Once I fill out the other albums in higher grade i'll probably give this album to a friend or nephew or something.

I then filled in the remaining blanks by going through the bags in this order > X, XX, XXX and set all those coins aside for acetone bath and Verdi-care if necessary. This comes to 30-40 coins which is more manageable than the 400 I had. When these are done being conserved I'm going to actually place them in album #2 since that will be a clean album. After that i'll acetone all the cents in the junk album and move them up to album #2.

I know it seems like a waste of an album, and we've discussed how not to re-use flips that other coins have been in but there are a lot of LWC dates! and I feel like I couldn't get anything done without visually filling some holes first!

Now the next thing I wanna do after this is taken care of is purchase some more bulk wheat cents. The "how to buy wheaties" thread suggested buying them by the pound on ebay, or for .5 cents each at LCSs but I don't really have a good LCS in Maryland.

So if I buy some bulk wheaties, how do I make sure I'm getting a group of problem free coins? The last bulk coins I bought at a LCS out of state were .4 cents each but many were cleaned, cull, and covered with verdigris. It seems like a very time consuming process to weed through a bunch of problem coins (Which I have to pay for), to end up with another big pile of LWCs that aren't really useable for my collection.

Would a good plan be to just buy pounds of cents on ebay, pick the nice ones, and resell it all back on ebay, passing the buck? Or should I just take a lot of time to bid on auctions with detailed pictures and try to know what I'm getting before I order? Maybe buy rolls that contain a certain decade or year, so I'mnot getting a batch of "mixed" cents that are all in the 50's?