Why Not Heat Seal Coins In Plastic Pouches?

The saflips I bought are made of PET - no PVC.

For now I only plan to seal the '71 and '72 Ikes so they can be stored with all my other mint sets, but I may decide to create my own '66 and '67 mint sets. The '65 SMS will fit in my mint set album, but the '66 and '67 SMS slabs don't fit in anything. Eagle (the album manufacturer) told me how to modify a page for displaying certified coins to hold the odd shaped SMS sets, and I bought one of the pages, so it probably depends on how nice the Ikes turn out as to what I do about '66 and '67.

That's an understatement. The fancier holders that one would expect to be sealed, like Air-Tites and Kointains, aren't completely air tight and have practical problems with sizing, labeling, and cost. Slabs are gross and expensive and they aren't air tight either. Anything that uses staples is a disaster since staples rust and gouge. I've tried many different types of holders and found that I can tolerate the limitations of Saflips.

I share your concerns about air tight storage and am aware of folks who use impact sealers with Saflips. I've considered buying one several times. My only concern is that the heat used to seal the plastic will cause the plastic to outgas as it's being sealed. If those gasses were harmful, I wouldn't want to seal them in with the coin. Are there any chemists out there who could comment on how harmful outgassing Mylar would be?

That's a good question. I just got my impulse sealer and tried it out last night. When I get the Ikes I'm looking for I plan to put it to use, but outgassing is a very good question. I found a detailed discussion of storage methods on CoinTalk that included talk of sealing saflips, but the conclusion was "why bother" instead of any quantitative data on outgassing.

Yes, I'm using the 2-1/2" flips for the '71 and '72 P & D Ikes that weren't in the mint sets




Another option is to put a mint token in the other side. There SHOULD be a ton of them floating around from broken up sets, but they were surprisingly pricey on ebay when I looked. I was lucky enough to have exactly 2 spare P sets and 2 spare D sets that I could cut the tokens out of.




I was also thinking that the U.S. Mint probably uses SOME heat when sealing their sets (we know they use quite a bit of pressure if the sealers can mark up the faces of coins as much as illustrated in a different thread).

glenzy1

The original poster was talking about sealing coins in general, but I was asking about the concept of sealing a few coins so they fit with my collection of sealed mint sets. '71 and '72 P & D Ikes are examples of coins missing from a collection of mint sets. Those COULD be stored in an album or could be slabbed, but it would be nice to store them in the same album as the mint sets.

Very nice!