After taking several years off from coin collecting I recently rediscovered the hobby and quickly found myself in the thick of it and hooked just as strong. I have been lurking on the forums for some time now but I decided to take the plunge and start posting.
With the prices of silver starting to rise my father and I decided to invest in bulk "junk silver" bags from a local metals exchange and I've really enjoyed going over huge numbers of silver coins cherrypicking overlooked dates and nicer condition coins.
So far in the last 2-3 weeks we've searched the following:
(3) 500$ FV Bags - Half Dollars
(3) 500$ FV Bags - Dimes
(1) 500$ FV Bag - Quarters
All bags contained all 90% silver coins (well they were suposed to anyways..) except for 1 of the half dollar bags which had about 90 40%
Kennedy halves. We ended up taking them back and trading them for 90% coins. All in all they bags consisted of much of what you would expect: many worn AG-F coins, some BU later year 90% silver and the occasional AU older date coin. Before we started the first bag we really expected to find a lot of later date silver but we were very very surprised to find that not to be the case.
The first 2 half dollar bags were about 85%
Walking Liberty halves and about 10%
Franklin Halves. A lot of mid-late 30s libertys and even a few in the 20s. We also found a great number of F-VF walking liberties and many AU franklins. The dimes were also a big win. The first 2 bags were loaded with
Mercury dimes. The first bag consisting of about 75% mercury (even a handfull of
Barber dimes) and the 2nd being about 40% mercury. The quarters were mostly washington but we found a lot of nice condition coins in there.
The only downer bags we had were 1 Dime (99.8% roosevelts - though many in the late 40s) and 1 Half dollar bag which was about 95% franklins.. I think we were a bit spoiled with the first few bags.
I'm still sorting through them taking a closer look for errors/dd's and mint marks to try and single out the gems. I hope to do a large summary of the project at some point and give the break downs for dates by coin types including any variation finds..
I'm curious if anyone else has been doing this and what your experiences have been. Ever find anything of great or decent value? I imagine that even if they had previously been searched for key dates there may be a possibility for some nice variation or semi-rare date coins.
Any tips on what to focus my searches on?
Posted 04/24/2006 6:20 pm
