i am new here so i hope i am in the right forum. i have been searching pocket change for years and my question is why are pre 1980 nickels so scarce. 1940's and 50's forget it,1960's maybe, a lot of 1964's 1970's soso. numerous 1980' and up. did the mint take them out of production? was there valuble metal in them? i know about the silver in the war years. the 1940's.
Welcome! Nickels are actually one of the easier sets to put together from circulation, are you searching boxes of them? The mint didn't take them out of production and the only silver are the ones you referred to the war nickels.
The War Nickels were from 1942-1945 with the mint marks over Monticello on the reverse. In so far as pre-1980 nickels being scarce, I'm not so sure of that as I get a lot of pre-1980 nickels in change. The only nickels with any precious metal in them were the War Nickels, with .05626 oz. of silver. They haven't been discontinued by the Mint. If you check the mintage figures in Red Book, you'll notice there was a healthy amount of nickel production through the 70s.
I must be living in the wrong part of the country, once a month iget a jar of change from my son and the change that i accumalate and I was surprized at how many post 1980 nickels i find but not that many pre 1980. i would estimate that for every ten nickels i find 9 are post 1980. thank you for your feed back leroy
I get 60s Nickels from the vending machine at work all the time. It seems I get less from the 70s myself out of all the decades. I rarely see 50s and previous though.
Welcome! I have found a few 1930s, 40s, and 50s nickels in change. A lot of those darned enlarged portrait Jeffersons are showing up now.
I see 60s 50s and older a lot, have tons of them, find like a war or 2 a box. And once found an 1887 librety head nickel that I later sold for a 6 bucks and got a planchet from the 80s that I sold for a dollar.
Welcome to the forum, elgrinch! In my opinion, I think if you look at the production numbers of earlier nickels, especially the pre-1960 years compared to modern mintages, the numbers are relatively small. Combine that with a couple million collectors, and a few thousand hoarders of pre-1960 nickels, and you will begin to see why the percentages of earlier years appear to be so scarce. Believe it or not, I actually found a 1939-D in change a few years back, but I can't even begin to imagine how many I looked through up to that point!
Yes Eps, it sometimes pays to know where to look. Better yet, being in the right place at the right time. I get lucky from time to time!
