Searching $100 in nickels - FINISHED! - Edited first post with results

[pendragon1998]

I went to the bank this afternoon and picked up 50 in loose rolls of nickels (the teller didn't have a box). 20 rolls are in hand-rolled wrappers and the other 30 are in rolls from the armored truck service. I wonder what's in there? I'll report after I'm done looking through the rolls - wish me luck (I'd love to find a buffalo or a silver jefferson)!

 

My main goal is to fill some slots in my Jefferson busines strike dansco (7113).

 

EDIT:

I was feelin' frisky this evening and went though all 2000 nickels in my $100 load. Overall, I was a little disappointed, although I collected several decent finds out of the batch.

 

I didn't find a buffalo nickel in the batch, but I hadn't really expected to. I did end up silvering twice - both of which were 1943-S. The second was worn way down to AG/G, but the first one I found was actually in fairly attractive VG and will fill a hole in my album.

 

The majority of the nickels ended up being from the 90s and 00s - no surprise there - but I was still a little surprised at how few 60s were still lingering, and coins from the 40s and 50s were downright scarce in this batch.

 

My approach to my Jefferson collection at present is to search rolls mainly for coins from the 1960s and earlier. I'm planning on being particularly picky with the 70s on up, so for now, I'm mainly ignoring them in my roll searching, unless a particularly nice one or an error catches my eye. In this batch, I found a few eye appealing coins from the 70s and a sorta cool 85-P misaligned die which I at first hoped was a broadstrike, but nothing major. A fair proportion of the coins were damaged by counter wheels, making me wonder about the shape that future populations of circulated moderns will be in for our decendants to collect out of our change. Those counter wheels are really trashing the circulating coinage. I ended up adding 14 coins to my album and one (the extra silver) to my silver stash.

 

As I said, the coins from the 30s, 40s and 50s were scarce - here are my numbers out of 2000 coins (40% hand-wrapped rolls, 60% machine-wrapped rolls). Numbers in parentheses are how many I found. Both the silvers came out of machine-wrapped rolls, which surprised me a little - I thought they'd be ejected from coin counting machines.

 

1938-1939 (2)

-------------------

39 (2)

 

 

1940-1949 (9)

-------------------

40 (2)

41 (1)

43-S (2)

46 (2)

47 (1)

49-D (1)

 

1950-1959 (9)

-------------------

53-D (4)

54 (1)

54-D (1)

57-D (1)

58 (1)

58-D (1)

 

I may add a picture or two tomorrow if I get around to it.

 

By the way - 50 rolls of nickels (1 box / $100) weighs somewhere around 25 pounds!

[Dwaine]

Good luck and keep us appraised to your status.

[pendragon1998]

To keep my spirits up as I go through these, tell me your best found-in-roll stories!

[zrlevin]

I went to the bank and got four rolls for my uncle's antique slot machine, and found a silver war nickel.

[cpm9ball]

To keep my spirits up as I go through these, tell me your best found-in-roll stories!

 

Maybe this will help get past the thought of searching all those nickels. I'll send you three $50 bags of Lincolns for you to search for me.

 

Chris

[pendragon1998]

Maybe this will help get past the thought of searching all those nickels. I'll send you three $50 bags of Lincolns for you to search for me.

 

Chris

 

Jeeze, Chris, you're setting off my twitch again! I went through a good hundred and fifty dollars worth of cents last year from a penny jug. My hands still smell like copper (well, now like a cupro-nickel alloy) I'm halfway tempted to take you up on that.

 

Actually, my Lincoln collection is getting darn near completion, although I'll be waiting for some time before I get the keys (or even semi-keys), unless I cherry pick them out of a wheats jar. I've only got 14 coins left out of the 251 coins I need to complete my Dansco 7100 (lincoln cent business strikes 1909-date) - but that's another post!

 

 

As for my nickel search, I just finished (I'm a go-getter) and I'll edit my original post to describe my findings.

[TomB]

I am stunned that you found so few coins from the 1950s. Perhaps it should not surprise me, but it does.

[pendragon1998]

60% (1200 nickels) were machine rolled by some company up in PA (I believe), while 40% (800) were hand-rolled, presumably by businesses or banks using local circulating coins (I'm in a medium-sized town in GA, near Atlanta). I think that it's likely that the roller company probably gets coins from banks up and down the east coast.

 

If these numbers are representative of the populations of coins in the SE or E. coast, I agree - that's a surprisingly low number of coins from the 50s left in circulation...

100% x (9/2000) = 0.45% of coins in circulation date from the 1950s.

 

There is, of course, the potential for bias due to the source of the coins, but still...wow. not many of those older jeffersons still in circulation, I guess.

[astrostu]

Interesting. Just as an FYI, I've gone through about 2 boxes of nickes in the last 8 months and never found a Buffalo.

 

I found "a lot" from the '60s when I searched, though. 'Bout the same as you from the '50s, but less from the '40s and '30s, though the second box I searched had more from those two decades. From my original thread back in February:

 

1930s: 1

1940s: 4

1950s: 12

1960s: 70

1970s: 183

1980s: 318

1990s: 667

2000s: 740

 

 

(Original thread here: http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Board=2&Number=1559109&Searchpage=1&Main=86135&Words=nickel+box+astrostu&topic=0&Search=true#Post1559109 )

[richbeat]

It's still possible to find every date and mint mark, but as time goes on it's getting harder and harder. In the past 10 to 15 years I've noticed a distinct drop off in dates from the 1930's through the 1950's.

[Conder101]

Intereting statistics. Back when I last searched nickel rolls I kept everything efore 1960. At the time I average two pre-60 coins per roll. You got 1 out of every 2.5 rolls so they have declined considerably. But that was also 25 years ago when I was searching, and a pre-60 was only about 20 years old.

 

I find the comments about the lack of 1950's coins interesting. What I find interesting is that there were as many 40's coins found as here were 50's coins.

[Coin]

Hey Michael , former Irmite ?/neighbor ....been off the site a while , but saw this post tonight.....believe it , dude , I know what it is like to go through that many nics....just finished about 15 rolls of dimes and 10 rolls of quarters and 20+ rolls of nickels , 1 roll of 1967 JFKs , only 6 rolls of cents. I didn't think of writing down any results , but can tell ya that I ended up with about 3 complete rolls of circ 1964 and 64D nickels....apparently that year is still very common and were so many in number that I set all of them into one big pile and rolled them up together.

Out of the dimes I only got about 5 cracked dies....all off the bottom of the torch on newer dates and one addititon to my error set of a severe clashed die dime ( found my second one of those...really cool with leaves coming off FDR's head and his head outlined in the branch on the rev.( Wish I could post a photo , but even Chris tried to talk me through posting pics back in January at the FUN show ....and I guess I am completely photo posting illiterate or something.)

I found three 40% silvers nicks from the war years , a few from the 50's and only one from the 80's with FS ( I was looking for errors and full steps mostly) .

Only about 4 of the newer state quarters were worth keeping , and I did not find any from before then worth saving into folder holes.

The half dollars were from a local auction and all were nice , but only two look like submission material for my registry set.

I did not count how many cents were kept , I have them on standby for a closer look-see later ...I'd say I set aside about 30 cents from the rolls.

 

All-in-all it was tiring on the eyes , but exciting to find a few noteworthy coins.

[Revenant]

Your numbers are considerably better than what I got when I tried this with $100 in nickels. On another note though, I also went through over 40000 pennies in the course of the last year. Wow, the things you still find in circulation... I've found a 1916, 1919, 1919-S, 1929-S, and some others from the 30's

 

Anyone want to guess how many pennies are in this stack?

[rbrown4]

$275.00 in cents is my guess.

 

Rey

[conqueror]

Thats a lot of work, hope you had fun!

 

john

[WoodenJefferson]

7,499 cents...one rolled under the fridge.

[cpm9ball]

25,000

 

Chris

[Revenant]

Thats a lot of work, hope you had fun!

 

john

 

I spent 2 days sorting through pennies pulling out anything older than 1970, 4 days building it and 3 days rolling the pennies back up. (It was summer vacation, I didn't have many demands on my time). It was definitely fun and it was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. This is actually the 3rd one I build. The first 2 were much smaller and I used them to perfect the design and make sure it would be strong enough. The first one only made it to 6" before falling, the second made it to 10" before starting to wobble in a very troubling manner. My goal had always been to make it to 12."

 

There were roughly 12164 pennies in the stack (There were 2 more empty boxes on the floor). I say roughly because pennies went everywhere when it came down and I was finding 1 or 2 pennies here and there for the next couple of weeks. It stood about 19.625 inches tall and weighed about 32.84 Kg by my estimations. It was still very strong (I could slap the side of it lightly and it would barely twitch). I probably could have made it several inches taller but I ran out of pennies, I was tired and my family wanted it out of the house. I might try again next year. I'll be going for 15000+ and 24."

 

[cpm9ball]

Thats a lot of work, hope you had fun!

 

john

 

I spent 2 days sorting through pennies pulling out anything older than 1970, 4 days building it and 3 days rolling the pennies back up. (It was summer vacation, I didn't have many demands on my time). It was definitely fun and it was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. This is actually the 3rd one I build. The first 2 were much smaller and I used them to perfect the design and make sure it would be strong enough. The first one only made it to 6" before falling, the second made it to 10" before starting to wobble in a very troubling manner. My goal had always been to make it to 12."

 

There were roughly 12164 pennies in the stack (There were 2 more empty boxes on the floor). I say roughly because pennies went everywhere when it came down and I was finding 1 or 2 pennies here and there for the next couple of weeks. It stood about 19.625 inches tall and weighed about 32.84 Kg by my estimations. It was still very strong (I could slap the side of it lightly and it would barely twitch). I probably could have made it several inches taller but I ran out of pennies, I was tired and my family wanted it out of the house. I might try again next year. I'll be going for 15000+ and 24."

 

Woody won! He was closest! Send them to him!

 

Chris

[Revenant]

Woody won! He was closest! Send them to him!

 

Chris

 

Sorry, I put it together almost 4 months ago. That stack and those pennies are long gone. Besides, do you know how much the freight shipping charges would be on over 70 pounds of pennies!