I while back I posted a picture of some of my 40% Eisenhowers in a different thread. Somebody asked what those little spacers were and I explained they were little plastic tokens that came with them from the mint. Well, I've been pondering this for a while and I've been thinking it would actually be nice if there were "spacers" available for coins like Silver Eagles. There would actually be two benefits. The first and most obvious benefit would be that they would keep the coins from scratching each other up inside the tubes. The second benefit is somewhat more difficult to explain as it may only apply to certain people with personalities like mine. I'll try to explain below if you can survive reading this. I collect quite a few different types of silver coins as bullion. For a long time my strategy has been to put the coins in tubes and attempt to fill the tubes up over time. I've managed to fill quite a few tubes. But since money is limited to around $100 per month, I tend to gravitate towards the less expensive coins, because I can fill tubes more quickly and thus I feel like I'm accomplishing something. So you might think I'd want the cheapest silver coins, which would be pre 1965 dimes. But the tube for dimes requires 50 coins. Plus the coins are small so I don't have a huge sense of accomplishment. As such, the type of coin I've been most successful in collecting has been the 1965-1970 half dollar. The reasons are simple: They are only 40% silver, hence much cheaper to buy. The coins are large, so it feels like I've accomplished more. The tubes are designed to only hold 20 coins - so I can fill them up even faster. So, I have a tube of American Silver Eagles. But so far over the years I've only ever managed to buy 10 of them. My tube is only half full. At this rate it may be years before I fill it up. It is depressing for me to buy those because they are expensive and I know I won't manage to fill the tube for a long time. I recently began buying the 40% Eisenhowers and I realized that if I kept the tokens as spacers, the tube fills up pretty quickly. I finally filled it to the top yesterday and it was only able to hold 12 coins (and 12 tokens). So I have a great sense of accomplishment. And since I paid around $12 a piece for those, that is about $144 worth of silver. Not bad. While granted, a full tube of ASEs would be worth around $760, the sense of accomplishment is still about the same for me. But I could fill up 5 tubes of Eisenhowers or a single tube of ASEs. So.. bringing me back to the spacers issue. If there were some kind of ASE spacer, that would be cool. I could protect the coins further, and reduce the size of the tube to 10 coins, which would create more easily obtainable goals for me, thus helping to encourage me to invest. I suppose if they made smaller tubes for ASEs that might also help. Anyway, I searched around on Google and didn't find anything specifically mentioned for this purpose. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for something that could work, even if it wasn't made for this purpose? It would just need to be plastic and roughly the same size as an ASE. Or - if maybe there was some easy way I could make them myself? Oh... and I guess there is a 3rd benefit of spacers... they just kind of look cool:
...I could swear I've seen this before... With something heavy like an ASE I would think many plastics would offer the same risk to scratching them. If you're just hoarding for bullion it's probably not worth worrying about. Maybe you could use smalle Air Tites, or find out what the foam the Air Tite's have in them (the little black or white ring) and find a materials deal and cut yourself some foam rounds?
I see a market niche here -- you could make spacers to the exact size for each coin type, designed so they contact only the rims of the coins. But they would mean fitting fewer coins per tube, as you say.
Just buy a crap ton of large airtites for your good coins and use the pop-out foam inserts as spacers for your other coins
Beat me too it. That's exactly what I was thinking. OP if you pm me your address I can send you some and you can see if they serve your purpose. I have small bag of them and I was wondering what a good use for them would be.
I thought I'd follow up here. I did indeed receive 10 of these foam inserts from Icculus today. They work pretty well. Unfortunately, it looks like 10 ASEs + 10 foam inserts is still not quite enough to fill up a tube. In the case of the eisenhowers it actually takes 12 coins + 12 tokens to fill up a tube. With the ASE it appears 11 coins + 11 foam inserts would do the job. Of course, I also chalk that up to the fact these tubes are often oversized. For example, I think the half dollar tubes are supposed to hold 20 but I can easily fit 21 and the eisenhower tubes can actually hold 22 coins.
I would think the best thing to do is to buy airtites and get the tubes for them. It might cost more but whats the point of buying airites only to use the foam? Plus this way you don't need to wear gloves to handle the coins.
I've noticed this too. I think 23 ASE's can fit in one CoinSafe tube. I've often thought about placing some sort of thin inserts between coins in a tube to help protect them, especially during shipping. But it would have to be soft enough to not scratch the coins, and be made from something that wouldn't react with silver. Perhaps something like this: http://www.gaylord.com/adblock.asp?abid=13631 Considering the tubes are oversized, a thin insert between coins should still allow for 20 coins to be stored in each tube. Note: This item was found with a quick search for the terms: archival grade padding. I do not know if this item is good for this purpose, but it's pretty close to what I've had in mind.
