After getting into coin roll hunting nearly a decade ago with wheat cents (980,000 coins searched winter 2014) I now have time to get back into this wonderful hobby.
I'm 35 years old and am fortunate enough to work in a bank where I have the privilege to utilize the coin counter machine free of charge. The typical cost is 9%. I live in the NW Ohio area and would be interested in sharing whatever information is needed of me to help develop a "heat map" so to speak.
These hunts will be conducted as free time allows, which hopefully is a fair amount right now. I can usually knock out 6,000 coins in about 4 hours, allowing me to work on this From 10pm-2am into the morning.
I have attached my findings below on the first 20,000 and will continue to update as deemed appropriate. Any advice, questions, comments are more than welcome!
A heat map is an interesting idea. From a spatial standpoint, it would be cool to develop a 'search result' map over a large geographic area--adjusted through time as findings evolve. Of course, all that would require a ton of work. Would be a challenge to find a few other high-volume searchers from different areas to participate.
The color legend is still a work in progress, I'm going to use it for the silver dates, not sure if I want to use it for the key dates and semi key dates.
I already have a 1950-D that I found in my first box of nickels about a decade ago. This chart is only going to include my new finds.
I made it through about 6,000 nickels when I was younger, then work and life pretty much took over up until now.
I have on order $500 of nickels that should be arriving Thursday next week. Depending on my schedule I may take a vacation day to go through them Wednesday.
$300 worth took me 4 hours Friday night, which got me to bed around 3am, about an hour later than expected.
I will put up a list of the coins I am still in search of. I did complete, or almost complete, a really nice looking 1970-2015 coin set in the first 20,000 coins. I have not found a single 2009 however, and I only found one 1971 that was in better than good condition.
You are obviously taking a serious approach to this and I admire your commitment. It would be my pleasure to check in on occasion and compare my experience with what you have.
In a prior discussion you asked about my Excel spreadsheet you say you're good at math so study the concept of 'circulation obsolescence' as that would be an interesting statistic to compare. Also understand the concepts of 'predicted find rate' versus 'actual find rate'. All of those are described in the threads I've linked below.
I stopped searching in 2019 after I had completed the entire series (twice) from local bank rolls. So comparing data between our two eras would be of interest.
One statistical item of note - I drew the cut line for keepers at 1959. I see you are going through 1961.
You can search the CCF and find lot's of threads I've posted on Jefferson nickel searching - I'll link a few here that might be of interest for you.
EchoCoin2023 I do not do this every night. This may become something that I do on Friday nights consistently though, allowing me to average 5 boxes per week.
nickelsearcher thank you for the info! It will be interesting to compare our findings. I can say that the few boxes I did back in 2013-2014 I feel had a lot more coins to find. Two sets completed? That's fantastic!
I will keep you all posted on my next update. I've created a YouTube channel to document this journey. As time allows I will provide better video quality with photos of good finds.
Out of curiosity, has anyone on the forum done something similar with wheat cents? I have tried to find some threads on the subject, but have not really drummed up much.
I saw my $500 of nickels get delivered today to the bank when Brink's truck stopped in today. I'm going to get started on them Friday at around 8pm EST.
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Posted 04/22/2023 08:59 am
