The Goal: 25,000 Rolls Of Nickels (All Searchers Welcome!)

I'm JonNickelCollector's son. We were looking through a $100 box of nickels about a week ago and I found a nearly uncirculated 1938-D. It's only the second 38-D we've ever found, and one of the best condition nickels we've ever gotten! Also, just wondering, how many of the five rarest Jefferson's have you found? We have no 50-D's, three 39-D's, two 38-D's, no 38-S's, and three 39-S's. Well, we have one 38-S but we bought it. The rest we've found in circulation.

It wasn't through roll searching, but it's still quite a find. I got my first Liberty Head in circulation, at a bank I frequent; the tellers saw it one day and saved it for me. It's a 1908, pretty worn, but I'm still glad to find a Liberty Head in the wild.

Hi,

I'm new to the forum along with my son who posted above. I started another thread about Jefferson nickels before realizing that this thread existed.

We each have 4 sets of the 1938-1961 Whitman holders, missing only some of the "rare five" and some of the silver nickels. Beyond that we only save the coins listed below, plus all silvers, all buffalos, any V nickels we find.

The list below includes what we have in our Whitman folders as well as the extras of some dates, all listed in order of rarity. I have listed the coins, the number found of each, the mintage of each, and finally what we call the "find ratio" of each. The find ratio is the number of coins found per million minted, and tells us how easy it is to find the individual coins.

Group 1 (Rare Five)
1950d (0) 2.6m (0)
1939d (3) 3.5m (.86)
1938s (0) 4.1m (0)
1938d (2) 5.4m (.37)
1939s (2) 6.6m (.3)

Group 2 (Under 10 million)
1951s (18) 7.8m (2.31)
1955p (12) 8.3m (1.45)
1949s (10) 9.7m (1.03)
1950p (12) 9.8m (1.22)

Group 3 (Under 15 million)
1948s (13) 11.3m (1.15)
1946s (10) 13.6m (.74)
1942d (9) 13.9m (.65)

And
1938p (13) 19.5m (.67)

Several things stand out:
1. The rare five are very difficult to find.
2. We have had no problem finding plenty of 1951s's, a coin some people have problems finding. The find ratio is by far the highest of all of these coins, even though it's mintage is just slightly higher than the rare five.
3. Other than the rare five, the 1942d is next hardest to find of these coins.

I'll talk about our silver nickels, Buffalo nickels, and V nickels in another post.

Murrellington - nice box! I have dug through a lot of nickels over the years but I've only just recently found a buffalo in circulation - from a McDonald's drive-thru! I've also been skunked on 2009s so far. Congrats on finding 12, that makes me hopeful.

that was just my 10th box of nickels. I got bored of doing cents and moved to nickels. and Strohbie: out of 10 boxes I have 80 2009 d nickels now, and I had a few more that I threw back because they were ugly. I haven't had a 2009 p yet, I live in san diego.

Copper nickel daddy- can you post a pic of all your Liberty nickels? I'm talking about 1 pic that shows all of them.

To answer some of your questions and comments, we have been at this a long time. I collected from 1990-1992, then took a lot of years off. My son, now a freshman in HS, started when he was young, maybe 5 or 6. My son's interest got me back in the game 2-3 years ago.

I have no idea how many rolls we have looked through. We never kept track. Rather than comparing the chance of finding coins per roll looked through, early on we developed our "find ratio" concept of dividing the number of coins found by the number minted in millions to assess how easy or difficult it is to find given coins. As an example, if we found 10 of a certain coin and the mintage was 10m, then the find ratio is one.

Another aspect of the find ratio is what is says about which coins have been selectively removed from circulation, thus decreasing their find ratios. The rare five would be expected to be difficult to find just because of their low mintage, but they are even more difficult to find due to their selective removal from circulation.

Another thing I did not mention is that we also calculate the group find ratios for Groups 1, 2, and 3 above by adding up the total finds in the group and dividing by the total mintage in the group. That produces some interesting statistics.

Group Find ratios at present:
Group 1= .32
Group 2= 1.46
Group 3= .82

Thus the Group 2 coins have been easier to find than the Group 3 coins. The high number of finds for the 1951s has skewed the Group 2 find ratio up, but even without the 1951s, the Group 2 coins have still been easier to find than the Group 3 coins.

One last comment: find ratios increase over time since the number found increases and the mintage does not, but the find ratios do not all increase together by any means, thus showing even more the difficulty of finding some coins.

I've been keeping count, and today I searched my 30th $100 box of nickels.

Not too much too talk about, but I found a 1935D buffalo (had to restore the date though). Also found another 1942D (got 6 of these now) and a few newer Canadian nickels.