This is my first time posting here obviously but I've been lurking reading over the forums for a bit now and I'm glad I have found this site. I wanted to get some oppinions on searching large bags of silver from local 'mints' or metals dealers.. My father recently decided to pick up a few half bags of silver to search. They were out of full bags so we ended up with 1 each of (500$ face all 90% silver) quarters and dimes. We had done this once before and had a large number of mercs in our dimes but we were not quite sure what to expect.. Though we havent gone through them with a loope yet to look for varieties .. from simple date/type sorting we seem to have a very excelllent variety.. The dimes bag was nearly 50% mercs (70% being 40s) and nearly all of them had visable dates.. there were some very nice condition mercs in there.. we even found 7 barber dimes. From the quarters we pulled about 40 barber and standing liberty quarters and a ton of 30s and 40s quarters. I will post more details on the bags/finds as we do more searching.. I was just curious about others experiences with this and if the high number of older type coins was typical of such a purchase or did we luck out? The place we purchased these bags from was a high volume metals exchange that just buys/sells bulk coinage .. I would think that if they were searching them on any level that a lot of the really old coins would have been removed so I'm wondering if there is a high likelyhood of finding something of even modest value in these bags.. ideas?
Are any of the older ones in decent condition? Or all so worn you can't really tell much??? I picked up a few Barber Quarters like that, but mine are beat... I put'em in 2x2s anyway, because, when I tell my non0coin collecting friends that I have a quarter from back before washington was on them, they are like ""NO WAY!!"" and suddenly pretty interested... Most, ok alot of people, have no idea aout the various coins that have differnt designs than those in use today...
My dad once got 2 bags of Junk silver....I got almost a complete set of Washington Quarters out of the one bag and also pulled about 6+ proofs out too. As for Halves....I would say about every date of Franklins and such. I don't think there is much chance of finding something rare in these as I bet someone goes through them.....but you never know....you might find something like a 1921 Dime...nothing rare but still nice. I've heard of people pulling out 1916-D dimes out of junk silver bags.....but it has never happened to anyone I know Speedy
the really really old coins were in g/vg or so and a couple were in the F range but a lot of the mercs were vf+.. also had a ton of au later date 90% quarters.. I still have a lot of coins to go through as I havent begun inspecting them yet for variations/mintmarks i've only managed to seperate them by type and decade.. I think it would be difficult for a company to cherry pick through 100s of thousands of coins with such a high turnover. I would figure that a lot of the nicer condition mercs and really old items would have been easily cherry picked and replaced with a common 64 version or heavily worn merc if they were really searching through them. I can see the original owners cherry picking the coins however. 250$+ in face of mercs seems pretty high out of a random bag of 500$ in dimes. we'll see though.. I guess I was just wondering if it would be advisd to go get more of these bags while they're available if the mix was this decent. Seems like a better shot over rolls from the bank but I could be wrong. thanks again -tom
Where do you guys find these people that sell junk silver?....is there a site? Lemme in on the secret...:secret:
it's a local company that claims to be a 'mint' .. they are a metals dealer and also produce those collectors edition silver dollars.. they often buy/sell large lots of mixed coins and then resell in various denoms as type bags.
