Thoughts on OBW? Do they exist?

Great tip

 

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You must live in a great area. I live about 20 miles from town. I only went to one auction. I bought a few coins..not worth much and all the Louie L'amour books he had. The coins cost me $2 and the books cost me $10. Besides collecting, I read my Louie L'Amour books. Just about finished, then I'll make a re-run.

 

I bank at the North Carolina State Employees Credit Union. I have a checking account, savings account, and three money market accounts. I used to keep a Safety Deposit Box too, but I found out they had little or no protection from theft on them. No interest either on the Safety Deposit Boxes. My wife and I have found a place to store them that no one would be able to find the money.
Anyway, I have never asked a teller for some rolled coins. Can you give me some advice as to how to get some "freshly rolled coins." What denomination(s) would you start with? Thanks. This is new territory for me. I would like to search them to see what's out there.

 

Over 25 years ago, I paid $60 for a 64 Fender Mustang all original and in beautiful shape.
I gave it to a friend, that helped me out in a hard time. I wish I would have kept it and just handed him some money. At the time it was valued at $4,000.

 

You just have to know what you're looking for, and be very careful. I have purchased quite a few true OBW rolls on ebay over the years, though a few that I thought were OBW based on diagnostics turned out to be clever re-wraps.

Most of the true OBW's I have came from shops. It's much easier to check diagnostics in person, and yet a few that I thought were no-brainers turned out to be re-wraps. Maybe I didn't check them carefully enough, or maybe even I can be fooled. On positive note I view each discovery of a deceptive re-wrap as a learning experience, and hopefully I don't make that same mistake in the future.

I'm a LWC variety searcher, and have found it interesting that most of the re-wrapped rolls I've come across appeared to be unsearched for varieties. Perhaps they were searched for high grade coins, or maybe for a particular variety, or maybe the searchers were simply incompetent, I don't know. Bottom line though is I've had generall good luck searching even the re-wraps.

I have socked away hundreds and hundreds of OBW Wheat Cent rolls for future searching. It is rare that I sell an OBW roll, since I view each one as a potential treasure trove. Maybe some day. I collect a few dates (54-S, 55-S, 56-D) by bank, and am always interested in trades of my extras for banks I don't already own.

If you are considering buying an OBW roll on eBay, PM me with the link and I'll give you my opinion on it. I used to have ongoing "Is it a real OBW?" threads on a couple of forums, and they were helpful in teaching folks about what to look for in real OBW rolls, and what to avoid. I'm not sure about public posting of active auctions, but closed auctions are fair game.

 

Look what just arrived in the mail yesterday.

It was a lot from an obscure auction that had mostly jewelry, so maybe I'll get lucky and find that 1909 S VDB. LOL 10+ pounds for $7.00. Not too bad.

 

I have found little stashes of cents that an estate sale has missed, or maybe a pint or quart jar/cup of change that they accumulated setting the sale up. I always bring the cup up and offer more than face value.

 

A few years back I helped a friend of mine liquidate his late father’s collection and he had a big glass jug of wheats so heavy that we needed a hand truck to move them…… Now I won’t take the time to sort the 200-300 wheats that I have. No way was I going to sort that jug. We loaded it and carried it to my LCS who weighed out bags like @Mountain Man bag and he sold them as unsearched and they truly were unsearched…. So yeah, I do suspect that unsearched hoards will show up for years to come…. I wouldn’t be too excited about getting them from EBay though.