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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 26559710, member: 68&quot;]The 1970 is another toughie in nicely made&nbsp; well worn condition.&nbsp; The mintage was higher than the &#039;68-D and &#039;69-D but a lot were made by worn dies and aren&#039;t going to look good unless they wear down to AG and hide it.&nbsp; They&#039;ll all be lost long before this can happen.&nbsp; The 1966 is a sleeper for the same reason: Even with its astronomical mintage most were extremely poorly made.&nbsp; It&#039;s also older and most were released before the end of 1967 giving it a major head start on the &#039;68-D that wasn&#039;t completely in circulation until 1975.&nbsp; The mint adopted FIFO accounting in 1972 which required them to ship out the oldest stock first but it took three years to completely cycle through all the coins.&nbsp; A lot of the older dates (especially&nbsp; 1965) were being released through 1975&nbsp; so you could still find nice AU &#039;65 issues until the mid-&#039;90&#039;s when the &#039;66&#039;s were long&nbsp; gone in high grade.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now days VG&#039;s and F can be top end for some of these dates if you insist on nice looking coins that are well struck, evenly worn, and not badly scratched.&nbsp; Every once in a while I&#039;ll see a nice VF old timer but most of these probably had very little circulation in this century.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since 1999 collectors have been picking off a few high end coins and this combined with the relentless degradation of coins in circulation makes collecting quarters from circulation extremely challenging.&nbsp; Of course there are other factors coming into play as well.&nbsp; In the mid-&#039;90&#039;s in the golden age of collecting eagle reverse coins there were 8 or 10 nice collectible coins in every roll. Very soon there won&#039;t even be 8 or 10 eagle reverse coins because of attrition and the vast mintages of bicentennial, states, parks, and women&#039;s issues. This makes it really tough to even find a few of the&nbsp; older dates so you can pick out a nice one.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone who just keeps plugging away can come up with a nice set but few do it so few realize how tough they&#039;ve become.&nbsp; In five boxes of coins there should be a nice set with most of the keys in nice attractive F or better and VF for older coins and XF/ AU for the later dates. I never imagined I&#039;d see it but AU&#039;s eagle reverse quarters are no longer common and even nice XF&#039;s are getting harder to find.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of these days collectors will start snapping up all the key dates that aren&#039;t bad culls.&nbsp; I don&#039;t recommend it because there are too many of them.&nbsp; But the numbers suggest this isn&#039;t as stupid as it sounds because high attrition is making these coins scarce and dilution is making them very hard to find.</p><p><br /></p><p>Total coin usage could drop at any time because government is still suppressing cash and even quarters are almost irrelevant any longer.&nbsp; About the only place to actually spend quarters any longer is yard sales. If these start backing up in the system mintages will plummet and the whole picture changes.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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