Don't Buy Heavily Worn Quarters And Half Dollars When "Stacking" Silver

Recently I saw an interesting YouTube video demonstrating why it is risky to buy "junk" silver coins sight unseen. That fellow stacked ten Kennedy half dollars and ten worn Walking Liberty half dollars next to each other. The stack of older silver coins was visibly shorter than the stack of less-circulated silver coins. Anyone who purchased those Walking Liberty half dollars on a per coin basis was getting less silver than if they had purchased the newer coins.
This may be intuitive -- but I was impressed to see this effect demonstrated so vividly.

Every Standing Liberty quarter that I have collected since the early 1960s has been heavily worn -- and coins with no date typically feel very smooth and no longer have reeded edges. So I repeated this experiment using eight SLB quarters and eight silver Washington quarters. The stack of eight older quarters is the same height as only seven Washington quarters! The photograph clearly shows how much thinner the Standing Liberty quarters are than the newer ones.

Although the design of the older quarter variety is attractive, I would avoid purchasing them to "stack" silver.


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