Quarters Worth Keeping

You can also work on an ATB collection of quarters.

The only info I found was that mint sets weren't made in 1983. So 1983-P and 1983-D could only be obtained in circulation?

I think that a collector that only cares about silver quarters is missing out. There are some beautiful/patriotic quarters that they are missing.

Silver quarters do have higher values in metal content, plus errors can be good to find.

Thanks guys! :)

The lack of Mint Sets in 1982 and 1983 created a scarcity of BU coins, especially quarters since they are the vending machine workhorse. Well-circulated 82/83 quarters have no premium but AU and above would be worth saving.

Ditto to the above comments. I will add the following consideration. Within the 1965-1998 Washington quarters, the lowest mintage ones are:
1968-D
1971
1969-D
1970
1969
Granted that these were minted in relatively large quantities (100-180 million), you MIGHT consider saving a couple of these if you find them in unc condition.

However, I once read someone's comment that they use a mintage cutoff of 50 million to decide if JFK halves are worth keeping. That number may also apply equally well here, in which case, the lower mintage Washington quarters from 1968-2008 are not worth keeping in the long run. State Quarters? Too many people collect these in my opinion to ever be worth much.

My favorite quarter errors are the ones struck on dime thickness (not dime planchets) stock. Apparently, when the first clad coins were made in 1965, someone grabbed sheets of clad rolled to dime thickness, and punched quarter blanks.

This prolly happened all the time with silver coins, they just threw the blanks back in the hopper and melted them.

With clad, the metals have to be refined out, alloyed, and new strip made, so the blanks sat in a bin until they gathered other scrap, like the strip with the holes from the coin blanks.

One day in 1970, at Denver, they ran out of quarter blanks, until someone noticed "we're not out, there's a bunch in that bin", and a star was born!

They're easy to detect. They're always weak strikes, and tend to have a field defect near the date. Weight will confirm the error.

While 1970d appears to have been the first, I've found a couple other dates. They bring $10 or more on ebay, and have the potential to skyrocket if the error becomes well known.