I've been selling a lot of Franklin halves on ebay. I've had a lot of bad luck with my graded common ones, especially the proofs. I sold a proof 66-1961 for 18 dollars and a proof 65-1963 for 14 dollars. The ungraded ones were going for scrap prices. It got to the point that it wasn't worth listing them. So I gathered what I had left and went to the coin store that treats me the fairest. He gave me a fair lump sum for all of them. I was happy because I didn't have to go through the hassle of packing and shipping a bunch of individual coins. I told him about my bad luck on ebay. He said that the price of silver now is worth more than the collectors value for these coins. He also said they were busting open proof sets and throwing the Franklins into the melt bucket. Is this a common practice now? I could see melting a bunch of them instead of them collecting dust in their shop.
Shoulda put an advertisement up here to buy them... I may have bought several off you, separate from ebay, of course.
You've got nearly $18 of silver in pre-65 proof set plus a PF nickel and cent. They are selling a 63 proof set for about $23-$25 on ebay. It's my opinion that the proof sets hold some value over melt but not much extra value. Of course, they hold much more value if they are sets 55 and earlier. The 56 and 57 bring some premium too.
So if you run a business and have hundreds of 1960ish proof sets going nowhere, melting a batch of them won't hurt. It also pays the bills.
