Anyone here ever bought something like the $1000 face value back of silver coins from places that sell that sort of thing for the purpose of looking for goodies? I just wonder is that stuff all really junky..like no dates or what?
I haven't done it myself but know some guys who have...they have done complete collections of Franklins....almost complete collections of Washington quarters from them....most of the time you can read the dates unless you are getting SL Quarters. Speedy
I bought a bunch of Barber Quarters and got about 25 new dates I needed, so that was good. Other than that, not really.
If your goal is to put together date & mintmark collections in circulated condition where quality isn't the objective, junk silver is a good place to look. One man's junk is another man's treasure. The coins and collections will never be worthless because of the silver content.
I haven't bought quite that much, but I _did_ find a 1934 DDO Washington Quarter once in a bunch of junk silver.
I have done this and I was able to nearly complete a set of Rooseys, Washingtons, and Franklins from them. My preference is to go to my dealer and just dig through his junk silver bin. Sometimes there are goodies and sometimes not, but atleast I don't have to front the money to buy an entire bag, I just buy what I want.
Chris is right, on wednesday I was at my dealers when a man came in with three ziploc bags of junk silver, I hate to use that word junk anyway I am buliding a P- mint washington quarter set 1932to 1964 all circulated. When the man left I asked the owner if the 9 quarters I needed to finish the set were in there bingo got them set complete Now move on to FRANKLINS.
I did a couple of weeks ago. Got it for a hair under melt (and silver has since gone up--and will probably go back down) and all I was looking for was the bullion. However, I did what any self-respecting coin collector would do and searched and found a nice G-4 1921 Winged Liberty dime.
Yup, did it about 4 years ago with a bulk purchase of Franklins and Walkers @ $2.35 each. I let them sit in a mint bag for about 3 years before I decided to pull them out and sort them. I figured they had been picked over already. I was right. I found nothing truly rare or unusual, but there were some pretty decent coins- several AUs and even a few common BUs. I managed to complete an entire set of Franklins less about 7 coins, 3 of which I had already found while searching rolls of Kennedy halves.
Sometimes you can find some better coins in the bulk bags. A dealer might be able to sell a fairly common date coin (say a 1/2 dollar) for $4-$5 to a collector, but that coin might sit in his inventory for months before it sells. However, the dealer can get $3.00 immediately by selling it a bullion. Thus, if the dealer doesn't want to deal with trying to sell the coin to a collector, or needs to raise some cash quickly they'll toss some nicer coins into the bulk silver.
