Just finished my latest batch of 200,000 cents (making 800,000 total since July 2006), you can find previous discussions here: http://www.cointalk.org/showthread.php?t=26461 http://www.cointalk.org/showthread.php?t=20207 This time round, here are the statistics: Pre-1940 Wheats: 106, including 1910, '11, '12, '15, '16 P&S, '17, '18, '19 P&S, '20 P&S Wheat Cents, total: 1005 Varieties- 1960 small date: 1 (first one!) 1971 DDOs: 7 1972 minor DDOs: 11 1997 Doubled Ear: 1 1998 Wide AM: 3 2000 Wide AM: 15 Errors- Blank Planchet: 2 Clip: 1 Rotated Reverse: 1 Foreign- Canadian: 2532 Bermuda: 6 Bahamas: 3 Misc: 4
My, you are tenacious. A bag of 5000 can take me weeks. search while you are young, it gets more tedious with age. Kudos.
I have gotten down to where I can go through a 2500 coin box in about an hour. 1.5 weeks ago I went through 7 boxes, or 17500 coins. This week I only went through 2 boxes but did have some pretty good finds, especially the 1920 Canadian cent which is the earliest possible date to get in the Canadian series. The earliest in the 5000 search was a 1919-S, the only pre-1940 in the bunch, but I did get 51 other 1940-1958 coins, a masonic penny, a Canadian error etc. Will report them later. Searching through cents can become addictive, kind of feeds that need of "gambling" sort of, the excitement of opening a roll and having wheats spill out, sometimes 5 to a roll is like hitting a small jackpot on a slot machine. Only much more fun and profitable.
I would like to see how you go through them so fast. I usually grab a box on Monday and deposit it on Thursday, lol. I first go through and sort into 12 plastic bins. Each bin being a year/mintmark I want to check for varieties and errors. All the wheats in another bin and foriegn coins in the las bin. I get excited when the sorting is over and I head to coppercoins to grab a list of varieties for that year/mintmark. Only to be hit over the head with 4 pages of results :/ I have actually gotten good at spotting DDO/R though. Just look for the cut in the letters - okay so its bit more complex but still. Small cents have worn me out .. I'm back to hunting for silver.
Thanks everyone! Coinmelt, I can understand how you get worn out if you look at them all that thoroughly. I typically only look at 14 dates with a loupe and all the others without magnification, which makes it go faster. Probably takes me about 6 hours to do $50 all told.
I'm curious: where did you get 200000 cents? Did you just go to the bank and get $2000 worth? At one time? Thanks.
I hesitate to admit it here, but I keep most of the 95% copper ones. It's a habit I got into when I was a kid, and now keeping them on a large scale I've noticed they sell for above face value on eBay. Since I have to sort them by date anyways to look for varieties it's not much more effort to put the coppers aside.
