I go through nearly a quarter million cents each year looking for doubled dies, repunched mintmarks, and other coins of interest. I have been asked plenty of times what I have experienced regarding the best method to use to get the most out of time and miss the fewest good coins.
Three tips I have come up with, if followed, will reduce searching time tremendously and will help improve your odds of finding something of value...
1. Sort the coins by date - looking through coins of a given date rather than mixed date batches gives you sense of what normal coins of a particular date look like so you can pick out the smaller differences. Your eye gets used to looking at them so you can pick out the oddities more easily.
2. Go through all of them obverse first in groups, then reverse, if possible. For the same reason as above, it gives you a good sense of what a normal obverse looks like if you look through a group of them together. Looking through the coins obverse and reverse one at a time isn't as useful, but sometimes it's all you have. I have a couple of boards I use to lay out 26 coins at a time. I look at all the obverses, then I use a second board to flip the row over and look through the reverses. It saves a boat load of time.
3. Pull anything out you are unsure of. Keep it aside for a day or so, then look at it again. If it's still just as impressive the next day, compare it against normal coins again to make sure you've got something odd. If you see it repeated time and time again, you probably have something normal that you haven't noticed before.
And there you have it. That's the most fail safe method I have found to get the goodies out of the piles of change I have been through.
Posted 01/20/2006 10:23 am
