Every now and then you get a coin that somebody's driven a hole through, and sometimes they're really nice looking coins except for the oddity that you can see through them. This sort of decreases the devalue obviously, so a while back I took a twist tie and started threading my holed coins on it. Sort of a makeshift good luck charm. This particular collection of them is three coins... an 1857 Seated Liberty dime, a really nice 1862 Indian Head Cent, and an 1853 silver Three Cent piece... Without the holes these things would grade fairly high and be worth quite a bit, but together you add them up and it's $0.14 14 cents face value and 14 is a lucky number and it's kind of an interesting little trinket... These coins definitely circulated during the Civil War, and $0.14 might not seem like a lot today but back then the average Union and Confederate soldiers each made only $0.51 a day and $0.14 would buy you something pretty nice. I've never wondered what the melt value of a $0.03 silver piece was. I learned something today checking on it just now while I was writing this, the silver $0.03 pieces were minted from 1851 to 1873 and they were 75% silver 25% copper they weighed 0.8 grams face value $0.03 and the melt value as of today the 14th of August 2017 is .3294 so it's worth about $0.33 in melt value, how about that? The dime is 90% silver and melts to $1.3159... total silver value $1.6453... And don't forget the copper. In any case there's probably not a lot of money to be made melting down $0.03 silver pieces, ya think? Oh wait... what would the holes weigh?
