Unsearched wheaties

[Coincurious7]

I love my high end coins. But I also like sitting in front of the tv going through rolls of wheaties for an inexpensive treasure hunt. But I dont know where one can find truly unsearched rolls. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

[Kenneth F]

I dont think an "unsearched" roll exists..

[FishyOne]

Some are searched less then others. Very, very few unsearched wheaties exist these days.

[cpm9ball]

I think the only way you might possibly find truly unsearched Wheaties would be to buy an original Mint bag, but you would still need to examine the stitching very carefully to make sure that it has not been opened and resewn closed.

 

Chris

[physics-fan3.14]

Unsearched, by which you mean not searched for rare dates, are best found in estate sales. Grandpa's coin jar usually hasn't been picked over, and could have some good stuff.

[thebeav]

With gold and silver at good levels, I don't know too many dealers that have time to look at wheat cents. There are just too many other things to do.

I would think you could obtain 'unsearched' stuff locally.

 

Paul

[HCumberdale]

I highly doubt that truly unsearched stuff exists at all. Anyone who bothered saving wheats would certainly have known about the 14-D and S V.D.B. and plucked those out. Even so, I think some older accumulations can be found that weren't as heavily picked through. My advice is to look for dealers in small towns that don't bother with them. I lived in a small town for a few years while going to grad school and was able to find a lot of decent things in bags of wheats they sold.

 

I would also advise to avoid anyone claiming that their unsearched wheats have resulted in key dates found, the sellers that throw in bonus coins for every roll you buy, or anyone with a ridiculous story about where they came from. Oh and also that insufficiently_thoughtful_person on ebay who sells "unsearched" "sealed" rolls with a flying eagle on one end and a V.D.B. reverse on the other...there could be an S on the other side!!! Those kind of people me off.

 

Find an honest dealer who will sell bags of circulated wheats to you with no representation of whether they are unsearched or not. You want to find the dealer who just doesn't care about them, doesn't have the time or willingness to look through them and just accumulates them as they come in from the public.

 

I used to buy bags from my dealer friend for $150 for a $50 bag. At that price I felt I couldn't go wrong. I eventually sold the bulk of those coins by separating the teens, twenties, thirties, and 40-50's and selling them to dealers that way in bulk. I actually made a (very modest) profit!

 

 

[cpm9ball]

I wonder if there are any 100 year old banks still in existence that haven't succumbed to corporate takeover. It would be cool to find one in some small town that had some of the machine-bagged coins still sitting in their vault.

 

Chris

[RWB]

I've been searching the same $50 bag for 35 years. Never have gotten past the top 25% of it-- mostly 1947s so far.

[James_OldeTowne]

I dont think an "unsearched" roll exists..

Funny !

 

They do. At my last show (this past weekend), I sold a wooden box of loose and rolled wheat cents to the dealer right next to me. I had owned the box some eight years or so, and never bothered to search them, other than as a cursory inspection to confirm that they were mostly wheat cents. As a matter of fact, they were obviously entirely wheats, but must have been set aside during the very earliest 1960s, since a very occasional Memorial cent would show up, but every one I saw was dated either 1959, 1960, or 1961 (and were more or less UNC).

 

Anyhow, since his show was very slow, he decided to start poking through the coins. During just the hour that he went through them, he found a 1913-S in VG, multiple 1909s (non-VDB), a 1922-D in VF but a little bent, and at least twenty coins in the teens with mintmarks.

 

There are three lessons to be learned here. #1, I sold them WAY too cheap (5c per coin, and we estimated 2500 coins). #2, I am awfully lazy, and should have searched the coins myself. And #3, unsearched hoards of cents are probably all over the place, since the coins were nothing special, just a pile of junk I bought off of someone at the coin club. But you WON'T (most likely) find truly unsearched stuff on eBay or in any common commercial venue.

[HCumberdale]

Thats pretty incredible James!

 

I did find semi-keys when l was actively buying and searching. In fact, I completed an entire collection aside from the 09-S, S V.D.B. and the 31-S by searching alone. Most of the semi keys were in G-VG of course. I never got as lucky as your friend did though! I probably searched 100,000 wheats or so to get to where I did. For me it was worth it for the fun of the hunt.

 

I am still convinced that I wasn't the first to look through the wheats I went through though - I was just not as picky as the people who collected them in the first place. I suppose there will always be a story here and there that proves me wrong though!

 

If anyone is going to get lucky I think they will do so the same way your friend did. Buying them at a low price from someone who doesn;t care about them.

[cpm9ball]

I've been searching the same $50 bag for 35 years. Never have gotten past the top 25% of it-- mostly 1947s so far.

 

And, I thought 4-1/2 years for a $50 bag was bad! Roger, did your bag come with instructions for filing for Medicare?

 

Chris

[Crohnos01]

I don't know what you guys are talking about.... There are unsearched wheats almost every night on the late night coin shows.....I know its true because they said so and its on tv....

[RWB]

..Medicare - just filled that out last fall, but with much resistance and complaining on my part. I might take the bag of cents with me in the pine box, just to mess with the folks doing the planting.

[James_OldeTowne]

Thats pretty incredible James!

 

I did find semi-keys when l was actively buying and searching. In fact, I completed an entire collection aside from the 09-S, S V.D.B. and the 31-S by searching alone. Most of the semi keys were in G-VG of course. I never got as lucky as your friend did though! I probably searched 100,000 wheats or so to get to where I did. For me it was worth it for the fun of the hunt.

 

I am still convinced that I wasn't the first to look through the wheats I went through though - I was just not as picky as the people who collected them in the first place. I suppose there will always be a story here and there that proves me wrong though!

 

If anyone is going to get lucky I think they will do so the same way your friend did. Buying them at a low price from someone who doesn;t care about them.

I can give other scenarios not specific to wheat cents, too.

 

At a local auction maybe five years ago, I bought a hoard of crappy rolls of various coins, mostly cents. It turned out that five of the rolls were Indian cents, in which I found an 1877 - yes that's right, an 1877 in borderline FINE! The rolls also had several semi-keys in nice shape, and I've always suspected someone's IHC collection got rolled up by mistake.

 

I've also told the story many times about my own stupidity with junk silver. I used to just toss junk silver purchases into an old plastic container. After a few years of this, a customer was sifting through the coins one day, and I kid you not, he found a 1916-D with strong full rims, grading G-6. I in turn had simply never bothered to look through cheap silver coins as I'd bought them, so I missed it.

 

If these kinds of things can happen to someone like me who is on a very small scale, then it tells me that there are probably far more truly unsearched groups of coins out there than one might believe. Again, the key is to NEVER expect to find them on eBay, or other such venues. You have to find "virgin" coin hoards, so to speak.