Little Tips And Tricks For Easier Working With Coins

I love quiet - but probably because I never get any. If I ever got a stretch of peace long enough to actually look at a coin at my leisure, I don't know what I'd do with myself!

Actually, maybe some of Dr. Just Carl's prescription might be just the ticket - I'll either scare everyone out of the room (including the dog), fall asleep, or won't care

As for tips... I keep a few of those teeny ziploc-top baggies in my glove box and/or whatever bag I'm currently traveling with, for any change I get that looks like it needs a second peek. Regular baggies are fine, too (unless you're going to leave it in your glove box and you live in Arizona) - it's just something to put it away in and separate it from other spendable coins rattling around.

I also keep a small magnifier with them. Nothing drives me crazier having to wait to get a close-up look. Nothing fancy - it's actually a small plastic thing that came with a child's toy kit. But it lets me zoom in a little closer and that's all I care about. The real close ups can wait until I get home.

Empty medicine bottles make great coin tubes. (wash first! )

The warehouse stores like Sams and Costco sell those big bunches of shop towels pretty cheap - a few are always around my desk to lay on top of whatever is already there (or the bare top) just in case something gets dropped.

The Max Flat Clinch stapler is the best stapler, hands down (no pun intended). Hands that hurt or just find it hard to put that pressure into stapling would greatly benefit from one of these.

Bibs are your friend. (for Scooby)

Office Max and Staples have sales on those DYNO label maker machines a lot. You have to buy the label rolls when you run out of the ones that come with it, but they're great for typing in a year/type information set once and printing many small labels. Saves writing

Boxes you get with everything you buy can be used to store 2x2's. Like tissue boxes are wide enough for 2 rows side by side - just cut the top half off. (the top-dispensing ones, rather than the top-and-side ones, would be sturdier)

One tip I learned from an earlier thread is to take a coin tube (for example pennies) and fill it with 50 coins. Mark a line at the top of the tube where the coins stop. Now you can just fill the tube to the line for the proper amount of pennies to roll without having to count them out each time. Saves tons of time.

OR, fill it to the top until it is flush. Count how many coins the tube holds compared to what is required to make a roll. For example, my coin tubes hold 52 coins when flush to the top. So when I'm ready to roll them back up for the bank, I fill the tube to the top and take out 2. Ready to roll!

When searching rolls I typically first sort by decade, then I go through each decade pile and sort by year. Then I pick the keepers. I consider this the 'normal' way.

However I read a tip on one of the coin websites that suggest first sorting by the last digit in the year, then take a pile and sort it by the decade. According to the site this saves time. I just don't get where the time savings is support to come in and haven't seen it myself. If I go decade by decade with the normal sort method, once I'm through it I can put that decade away and free up my table space to continue onto the next one. With this alternate method, just to get through a decade it seems like you have to sort the whole thing into 100 piles instead of 10 just so you can find the coins for the decade you're working on.

For me this alternate method sucks because I'm working on sets and decade by decade is convenient. However, once my sets are complete and just looking at one year at a time with the alternate method may not be too bad.

Overall I see no time savings. With both methods you still need to do two sorts, one by year, one by decade, and I don't see how reversing the order simplifies anything.

I am just surprised that it had not happened sooner.

I believe that's explained here a couple of times by Coppercoins. The way he explains it, there is indeed a time savings - I will see if I can find one of his posts on it.

I first go through ALL the coins and pull the older ones and US or foreign ones out right away. Then I sort into piles or rows of decade/year. My loupe and magnet handy, I check each one and toss the ones I don't want to keep or look closer at into a container.

Sometimes I'll check roll by roll, coin by coin as I empty the rolls, then get impatient. Depends on my mood how I go about it I guess

For viewing coins I wonder if that computer type microscope thing would make that an easy task. The ones that you just pass a thing over an object and it appears on the screen. Not sure where they are being sold now but some time ago they had them in the toy department at Walmart. With one of those you could just lay out all the coins and pass that thing over them, view them on your monitor. Of course I think they were standard 300X or something like that. Still would like to get one someday and try that instead of holding the coins.