I know pawn shops and the We Buy Gold/Silver guys buy a lot of coins at a percentage of melt value. What I'd like to know is who do they sell them too and can you buy from them? Around here Pawn shops and stuff just buy they don't sell and I know they aren't stock piling it so they have to be sending it somewhere. Just curious.
Search for smelters in your area. Sometimes even scrapyards or recycle yards will buy the scrap silver/gold for smelting. I know in my area there is a big company in Chicagoland here in the suburbs that will take any metal including precious metals. And I know my three local coin shops go to them to sell the scrap PMs they receive from customers. When I'm ready to turn in my scrap piles I will be going to them instead of the coin shops. Cuts the middleman out. Unless the coin shops give a better total price than the actual smelter.
If this business is anything like others, you may not get a better deal from the smelter. They may not want to deal with small-time, one-off customers, and they probably don't want to undercut their regular customers (the retail shops that sell to them). I've heard from multiple folks here that silver coins rarely actually get melted today; you get more selling them on as silver coin than by selling them to a refinery. (I see that premiums have decreased -- Provident's buy price for 90% is now slightly below "melt", where until recently it was above -- but in general junk silver coins retain a slight premium.)
In the shop where I work, we don't melt silver, but rather push it from place to place. US coin silver is identifiable and is therefore a known commodity. Privately assayed silver is less predictable and less reliable, people prefer to deal in a known 90% coin, than to take a chance on a private 100% bar.
Plus, it is not a real easy process to go from 90% silver to 99.99%. Does anyone sell 90% silver bars? Would that be a good item? Should I look into a kiln....
but my point is that if you have a choice to buy an unknown commodity from someone versus a known commodity, that typically you will be more apt to buy the known commodity over the unknown. For that reason, it would be insane to melt US government minted silver coin.
I sell to a gold and silver refinery that usually gives me 96% melt value for silver. I had $30.00 face of 40% Kennedy Halves and some scratched up rounds that no coin shop wanted. They'll buy anything and give 96% of spot for silver and 99% of spot for gold. Good to have one of these guys in your back pocket.
Actually, if you know that the other 10% is copper, it's somewhat easy. The tough part comes with stuff like sterling, where sure, it's 92.5% silver, but the other 7.5% can be all kinds of stuff, requiring a variety of purification steps.
