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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 49458, member: 68&quot;]I should have phrased this better.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Most coins now days will all be struck by 1,000 or 2,000 sets of dies, more or less.&nbsp; Each set of dies (die pair) will tend to strike their finest coins when they are new and horrible coins right before they are retired.&nbsp; Coins from new dies are not necessarily nice coins though.&nbsp; The dies can be misaligned or spaced improperly or just not hit the planchets with enough authority to bring up the entire design, but they don&#039;t normally get better with time.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>When you get coins from the mint they come in large bags.&nbsp; These bags are not representative of what was struk that year.&nbsp; The bag could contain only ugly coins from&nbsp; fifteen or twenty die pair or it could contain almost all gems from brand new dies.&nbsp; But it will not contain a few coins from all the different dies because of the way that dies are used and the bags are filled.&nbsp; When these bags are counted into smaller units these smaller units will be representative of the bag not the mint&#039;s production.&nbsp; This means every single example of a rare and valuable variety like a &#039;55 DDO cent or an extra leaf WI quarter might go into a single bag.&nbsp; It also means you can check these pretty fast since in you know what die pairs are in the bag then you don&#039;t have to actually look at every coin. (if there are a dozen different coins in a &#039;55 cent bag and none are doubled dies then there are no doubled dies in the bag).&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>This will also apply to badly worn dies since every example of a die that is included will range over only about a quarter of the dies&#039; life usually.&nbsp; On rare occasion coins will be damaged as they are ejected from the dies.&nbsp; Since this will affect every coin this can help speed you through a bag.&nbsp; By the time you get well into an accumulation you should have a pretty good idea of what you&#039;re looking for.&nbsp; This will save you the time required for close inspection of each coin.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>You really can go through $500 worth of quarters in as little as 10 minutes with little danger of missing anything important.&nbsp; With the newer coins there are a lot more nice strikes and this can slow you down consideranly.&nbsp; You can also be slowed if there are four or five die pairs you&#039;re pulling out or if there is some minor variety that&#039;s difficult to see.&nbsp; For these a large magnifier on a flexible arm will speed things up and save wear and tear bending over with a hand held loupe.&nbsp; The longest a $1000 bag takes me is about 7 hours and the shortest is about fifteen minutes.&nbsp; An hour is typical.&nbsp; I try to save the nicest of each die pair even when they&#039;re not very good.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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