I just found a bag of my old coins from when i collected, what is this? I know its a buffalo nickel but what I don't know is any year range, value, or even what they're supposed to look like. My first post so pardon my formatting.
It is a dateless buffalo nickel minted between 1913 and 1938. I do believe I "may" see a bit of "23" where the date would be though. So, possibly 1923.
...also made in Philadelphia as seen from there being no mint mark below the "FIVE CENTS" under the buffalo...uh...bison(?). S would be San Francisco and D would be Denver. Welcome to CT
Welcome to CT. You did fine on your first post..... There was a design flaw with Buffalo nickels. The flaw is that the date was on the highest point of the coin. So the dates wore off many of these grand old nickels. Still is a cool old piece of history that you can hold and treasure.
Yeah I figured I would get more specific information about this specific one out of a community like this, which I guess I have!
Actually Google does a pretty good job if you stay away from Youtube. Best is to get yourself a Red Book (A Guidebook To United States Coins - Yeoman), find a used one, because you really can't explicitly trust their prices, but the information is great.
Okay, I know there has been talk here before about using Nic-A-Date, which might be helpful not only to OP but also to me. I did a search on the forums but couldn't find anything on how to use it to expose the date. Why can't I find any previous discussions when I do a search using the name? I know I've seen it here, which is why I just bought a bottle of the stuff because of the chatter here. Help me out, folks!
Nic-a-Date eats the surface of the nickel away but it exposes the date. If you want a date, it works great but the coin will be forever damaged by using it.
My coin shop regularly has a box of 200 of these, think last time I picked some up they were sold to me for 75 cents each. Of course that's only regarding the most common buffalos.
Good enough, and I understand, but I guess you're saying it then devalues the coin. I don't want to do that, but then what do you do with buffalos when you can't read the date? Toss them? I don't see any real value to them when you can't read the date.
A lot of people use no ddte Buffslos to make jewelry. Others just save them in rolls. I know one person that uses nic-a-date and it trying to build a complete collection of Buffalos that have been damaged by restoring the date.