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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Blaubart, post: 1910233, member: 37498&quot;]For whatever flavor of ring you&#039;re thinking of making, look at the mint numbers.&nbsp; Choose the year with the highest mintage, find cleaned coins with nice details and go for it with a clean conscience.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another option, make them using half dollars taken from 2003 or 2004 silver proof sets.&nbsp; Nobody seems to want those.&nbsp; I can sometimes score complete 2003 or 2004 silver proof sets for around $30 shipped on FeeBay.&nbsp; Based on today&#039;s spot price of $19.64, my max is $30.81 for a 2003 and $31.06 for the 2004.&nbsp; (2004 has an extra nickel, so I&#039;m willing to give a little extra for those because I&#039;ll get a little extra when I sell off the clads.)&nbsp; I just scored two 2004&#039;s yesterday for $29.99 each shipped:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/151285763563" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/151285763563" rel="nofollow">http://www.ebay.com/itm/151285763563</a></p><p><br /></p><p>(Melt plus face value of the clads in a 2004 is $27.39, so $29.99 isn&#039;t bad at all.)</p><p><br /></p><p>If all you want in the proof sets are the halves, you can sometimes come across fair deals on rolls of year 2000+ proof half dollars.&nbsp; Cheapest I saw in a search just now on FeeBay was $204 shipped.&nbsp; That&#039;s what, spot plus 44%?&nbsp; So the sets are usually a better deal, but more labor intensive for you.</p><p><br /></p><p>Should you choose to do this, don&#039;t go about it with the assumption that every coin that you don&#039;t make into a ring is just going to get melted down anyway.&nbsp; There aren&#039;t too many coins getting melted down since they&#039;re usually worth more in coin form.&nbsp; The ones that do get melted down are usually highly circulated, heavily damaged, and very common.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have a scrap bin that I would eventually like to refine using nitric acid.&nbsp; It contains damaged sterling silver jewelry, <i>heavily</i> damaged 90% silver coins (pitted, bent, etc), <i>heavily</i> worn 90% coins (to the point of hardly being able to recognize any features at all), and some shavings that came from my daughter making a couple of rings for her and her friends.&nbsp; A couple of dimes in the bin are so worn that they are paper thin.&nbsp; I wouldn&#039;t even make rings out of these coins because there either wouldn&#039;t be any details, or they would look like crud.&nbsp; But even so, if any of them were by any means rare, they might still be worth keeping to someone, so I wouldn&#039;t destroy them.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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