Tuesday, March 31, 2015

The Oldest Wheat Penny I've Found So Far



I didn't have time to pick up a lot of change to work on my coin roll hunting hobby today but I did manage to get ten penny rolls from one of the seven banks I can walk to downtown. I went through all of these and only came up with one coin but it turns out to be the oldest wheat penny I have found so far, at least the oldest one since I started keeping track on this blog. It's kind of strange that I went through this many coins and only got one hit but I guess it's a good one. I'm also surprised at the condition this one is in. It looks really good, it may be that it's been cleaned by a previous owner but I still think it looks like it's in fair condition when you consider that it's almost a hundred years old. The penny is a 1918 with no mint mark and there is an image of both sides of it above. I have to work tomorrow but I will try to post images from the last full boxes of pennies and nickles I went through. Below is the image of the rolled up pennies I picked up today.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

I Found Five Wheat Pennies In 40 Coin Rolls



I didn't have time to grab my box of nickles today so I grabbed twenty rolls of pennies from two different banks I usually don't get change from. This was $20 worth of loose rolls I had to go through. There are both good and bad points to going through paper penny rolls. The bad thing is that you could strike out as many of these rolls are brought in by customers that go through their change and keep any rare or old coins they find.However, the best hunts I have had were from random rolls like these. One time I got just twenty rolls from one bank and found seven rolls that were nothing but wheat pennies. Unfortunately this wasn't one of those lucky treasure finds.

Actually I only found five wheat pennies in this whole lot. That means I only got one hit for every eight rolls I went through. This is way under my average of one for every 4 penny rolls. Maybe I'm just having a dry spell or maybe my banks are starting to run low on old coins. It is getting harder to find valuable coins every day as more people are starting to sort their change for older coins they can hold on to. Below is a single scan of what I found. I wasn't going to separate these for multiple images when I only found five coins.



Today we scored a 1949 and a 1949D. We also got a 1952D, 1953D and a 1956D. They all looked pretty good except for the 1949D which had a lot of green oxidation which some people call verdigris. This wasn't bad enough to clean as I am like most collectors and don't want to clean any coin unless it is so bad I can't see the date it was minted. Overall I'm very unsatisfied with this coin roll hunt but you win some and you lose some.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Two Free Wheat Pennies I Recieved For Free From Work

I love when I get these free wheat pennies from one of the guys from work. I'm on the clock and it's kind of like a bonus for doing nothing. On the night I work with this young kid named Kevin he will sometimes give me a wheat penny or two. They always look in really good condition. Honestly I think he cleans them which I've tried to tell him not to do. Maybe he is getting them from a regular customer or something. However he comes across them I'm just glad he gives me a few of them for free. I think he started collecting them when he saw me taking home rolled up coins after work. I explained to him what I was doing and I think he caught the coin collecting bug. I think he's still in high school so if he keeps collecting by the time he gets my age he'll have a large collection of valuable wheat pennies. Below is a scanned image of the two free wheat pennies I received. One is from 1936 without a mint mark and the other is a 1957 Denver coin.



I have more rolled up change to go through tomorrow. I hope to have some interesting finds to share with you all.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Twelve Wheat Pennies I Found In A Box Of Coins From The Bank



So I jumped on the bus to cash some checks last week and I also had my big bag of change to drop off at one of the banks I use that has a change machine. Unfortunately their machine was out of order and they said they would not have it fixed until later in the day or maybe the next day. So there I am holding a huge bag of pennies, nickles and dimes that probably weighs over forty pounds. I had other things to do that day and I wasn't going to lug that heavy bag of coins to the store and to my other bank. So I ended up standing there at the service table on the other side of my bank and rolled up sixty dollars in nickels so I wouldn't have to carry so much weight with me. It took me over an hour and wasted a lot of time but I really had no choice if I was going to get more coins that day and be able to do my shopping before the last bus runs. Because of this I couldn't get my box of nickles but I did get a box of pennies which is what your looking at now.

After going through this full box of $25 in pennies I found twelve wheat pennies. I tried to line them up in the picture from oldest to newest but my brain just isn't working right, plus I can't see very well so even though I have them lined up on my desk I always seem to get the order wrong by the time I line them up on the scanner. I guess I need to keep taking separate pics of the coins I find from each decade to keep them sorted so I don't keep making these mistakes. Here is a list of what I got. One 1930 and one 1935 with no mint marks. A 1940, 1944D and a 1946. Not bad for some before fifties coins. The rest were a 1950D and two 1952D coins. Then a 1953D, 1954D and 1956D. I believe the last one is a 1954 with no mint mark but I can't be completely sure because the last number is almost worn off. The condition of these old pennies is not that bad and this was more than ten wheat pennies in a box which is not bad. It comes out to about 1 penny in ever 4 rolls which seems about the average you find these days. At least that has been my experience. I'm always satisfied if I find one keeper penny in every four to five rolls I go through. Below is the image of everything I found in this box.



I have lots of loose penny rolls I have gone through in the last week that comes from change I bought at work. I will be putting together blog posts from them and I'll try to get those posted in the next week. I also have some updates I need to do to this blog to make it look nicer. Check out the sidebar to see what I'm doing.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Going Through 8 Penny Rolls From Work In Search Of Old Coins And Wheat Pennies



Tonight was a long tight of work and I was tired as hell after more than eight hours on the clock. I wanted to get home fast and rest but that doesn't mean I don't have enough energy to coin roll hunt. I might be wore out but it doesn't take much effort to open up a few rolls of old coins and look for some wheat pennies. I'm glad that I work at a restaurant that lets me do this. I can get tons of change from the banks in town and in fact I picked up a box of pennies today but I'm saving that for tomorrow and even with the large amount of change I go through I still find myself wanting more.

I think honestly it's becoming an obsession with me, I know how much these old coins are worth and I'm not talking about the value that some website gives them or the red book value. I'm talking about what the market is willing to pay for them. I consider the market to be eBay and i check what lots of rolled pennies and nickles go for all the time. Wheat pennies do go for a fair price, it's not a huge amount of money but it is enough to make coin roll hunting worth your time if you do it as a hobby. I plan on doing a post about selling rolled coin lots on eBay soon but this will be a huge post and I'm not willing to dedicate the large amount of time it will take to write that article just yet.

I went through these rolls as soon as I got home. I only found two wheat pennies in them but that is not bad for four dollars worth of pennies. One is from 1946 and the other is a 1947. Neither one of these wheat pennies has a mint mark. These old coins are fairly common dates and are in average condition for what I normally pull from my rolls so nothing extraordinary this time.



I still haven't found any really old coins. I'm hoping to find and Indian head penny or a flying eagle. I've only been able to pick up coins like that through buying them online but I've seen videos of people pulling them out of random rolls so I'm hopeful I will see at least one Indian head penny pop up soon. I have another full box of pennies sitting in front of me as I type up this post. I'll be going through them tonight so lets hope I find some good copper coins.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

A Box Of Nickels From The Bank With Three Silver War Nickles And Tons Of Old Coins


I got really lucky today. I have gone through at least ten boxes of nickels and from my fast experience you only find one silver in every two boxes or so. I have also only been averaging about 30 nickles that are 1995 or older. When I counted up all the old coins I pulled from this $100 bank box I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This has been so far the best box of 50 coin rolled nickles I have ever gone through. This will now be the box to beat for all my future posts on this blog. I estimated that the going eBay prize for these coins would be close to $10 if not more. Since there were so many Jefferson nickles worth keeping I decided not to post pics of them from individual decades. I will just show you the total amount of old coins I found along with an image of the silver war nickles. Here is a breakdown of what I found.

There was a total of seventeen nickles from the forties including the three silver war nickles and twenty-four from the fifties for a grand total of forty-one nickles. If we do the math at is 1.21 hits per bank roll. This is definitely the best box of nickles I have ever gone through, especially when you consider the silver finds.



The three silver war nickles I found didn't look too bad either. They are black from being tarnished but the coins themselves still have a lot of detail. The date and words on each of these old coins is very visible. I got one 1944 and two from 1945 so I am very happy with these.



I am pretty impressed with this box. I'm hoping to get one that is even better in the future. If I can get one that has four or five silver coins in it that would be amazing. I will try to get another box of coins from my bank tomorrow but I don't know if they will have anything for me. At the very least I will pick up a small amount of loose rolled up pennies or nickles and make a blog post of what I find.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Two Wheat Pennies And Two Old Canadian Pennies I Picked Up From Work

Sometimes when I'm at work I will get a few random finds. Since I don't work the register I only get these when someone else saves them for me. I think I got all of these from my buddy Kevin but one of the wheat pennies might have come from some loose change I went through. but anyway if Kevin reads this, thank you man.

I know it might seem like a waste of time to post these but I want to keep track of every old coin I find from this point forward so here are some images of all four of these coins. First we have the wheat pennies, one from 1944 and one from 1945. Neither one of these is very old and I don't think these are rare at all. They are not in very good shape as you can see from the scans. They are fairly pot marked but the dates are very visible. The backs of these look to be in about the same condition as the fronts. I am still happy to get these as any wheat back that isn't from the fifties is still a good find.


The two old Canadian pennies are dated 1943 and 1947. These aren't as valuable as wheat pennies but they still have a numismatic value that's higher than a regular modern coin of the same face value. These also look pretty good compared to the other two coins. Is it just me or do the older Canadian coins stand up to the test of time better than their American counterparts? Maybe they stay in better shape because they are foreign currency and are more likely to have been sitting in someones coin collection and out of circulation.


So I will be adding these wheat backs and old Canadian pennies to my personal collection. I actually have a lot more coin rolls I have already gone through this week but I have not had the time to get the blog posts together. I will try to do that before the end of this week.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Found Some Wheat Pennies While Coin Roll Hunting A Full Box From The Bank


I have gone through about a dozen full boxes of pennies and countless single rolls before today but this will be my first official post of a box I've gone through and shared online. I think I'm going to skip using my phone to take pics of these because all three of the cameras I have available right now look like crap when I take pics. When I do scans of the money I find while coin roll hunting the images look a hundred times better so I think I'm going to stick with this method. It might even be said that the coins look too good when they are scanned. It could be that I'm just blind and cant believe how good they look when their magnified, because believe me I'm so blind I sometimes bump into walls. I've been wearing glasses since I was three years old so yeah.

This is actually thirty dollars worth of pennies that I coin roll hunted but since I was waiting for the bus I went ahead and went through the first five dollars worth after I ate my fish sandwich and fries from Hardee's, damn that is a good fish sandwich but still not as good as they use to be about 10 years ago. Anyway you're only getting a picture of the $25 bank box of pennies here. I don't think anyone really cares about that anyway. The ten loose rolls I went through were almost a bust. I found one 1940s wheat penny from that group and a 1952 George VI Canadian penny. These have a value comparable to wheat pennies so I keep any of these I find.

Altogether this box was not that great. From my experience an average box of fifty rolls of pennies yields you about twenty wheat pennies or about that many coins that I would consider valuable only by their age. I don't really hunt for anything else as my vision is really too bad to catch error coins and the whole process seems way too time consuming for me. If I get more than twenty hits from a box then it's a good day for me. If I get less than fifteen then I am kind of bummed out. Here is a summery of the small amount of pennies I'm adding to my copper hoard.


I scored seven 1940s wheat pennies today. These are the oldest U.S coins I found today but at least these are almost all early in the decade. I don't think there is anything that really stands out but maybe you have a better eye than me. I would have liked to see some much older coins but something is better than nothing.


There where six 1950s wheat pennies. Which was really disappointing. I mean the fifties pennies are still so common that I should be able to pull over ten from a box easy and this was ten rolls more than a full box so I'm gonna go over here and cry for a little bit.


The last thing I found was a 1952 George VI Canadian penny. Above is a scan of both sides of the coin. As I said I keep my older Canadians and British coins because they have values similar to wheat pennies.

This was not a good box at all, not the worst box I ever opened but I had hoped I would have a better box to use for my first blog post. I think the worst box I ever coin roll hunted with gave me 12 wheat pennies and nothing else. Because there where so few hits in this box I won't be adding any of them to my giveaway project. It will probably be about a month before I'm ready to work on the coins for a cure blog anyway. Even though this was one of the least exciting bank penny boxes I have ever gone through I actually had a really good day today. I also picked up a box of nickles from the bank and found a ton of old Jefferson nickles including three silver war nickles. I have never found that many in one box before. I'm going to make a separate post about that and I'll try to get it up before this weekend. I hope you guys are having more luck with your wheat penny and coin roll hunting than I did with this box.

Monday, March 9, 2015

My First Box Of Jefferson Nickles For Old Coin Roll Hunting


This is not the first box of Jefferson nickles I've gone through. In fact I've probably done a dozen of these so far but this is my first post so I want to keep everything in order. From this point forward I will be keeping a record of what I find while I'm old coin roll hunting. This was actually $150 worth of nickles but I forgot to take a picture of the other fifty dollars in coins so I'm just using the box in this image. I know it's not a good picture but I'm just getting use to using my phone. I promise I will have better images in the future.

Usually when I go out to get rolled up change its on a day I don't have to work and I try to get out early. There are a couple places near my banks where I can sit down and go through some of the coins and then take them back to one of my banks that has a coin machine so I can get more to take home. This allows me to go through more change when I'm old coin roll hunting and gives me more bang for my buck. There is also no investment for me in transportation or gas since I ride the bus to do this and I have to make a trip into town once a week anyway to cash checks and get something to eat.

The first fifty dollars in nickles I went through didn't yield a lot. I think I found less than ten nickles that were dated 1959 or before. The full box was a lot better though. Below are some pics of all the coins I found separated into categories of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. altogether it wasn't a bad haul.

I found two 1939 Jefferson nickles that weren't in really bad condition. At least I can read the dates on these. No buffalo nickles though. There were sixteen nickles from the 1940s, twenty-six from the 1950s and a twenty pence British coin. That means I got 44 hits out of $150 in nickels. If we do the math we get 150/44 which gets us a value of 3.40. That would be almost 2 high value hits per roll of nickles. Not too bad but a war nickle or two would have been nice. Even without any silver coins the price that these coins go for at auction makes them worth at least ten cents over their face value and they could go as high as twenty cents so given the time I've put into these this works out to about minimum wage. This something I do once or twice a week and for most people this would not be worth their time but I think if your out of work you can at least have some money coming in if you do this. It could also be a great way for kids to make money to supplement their allowance or a part time job.



Tomorrow I'm headed to the bank and I will try to get another box of nickles and a box of pennies. I will try to do a blog post for each of these. Wish me luck.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Welcome To My Old Coin Roll Hunting Blog - Get Some Free Coins From Me

I've been old coin roll hunting for several months now so I decided to create this blog to keep track of everything I find. If you follow this blog you'll get to see why getting change from your bank each week can be a great way to find some interesting old coins that can also earn you some extra cash.I also find this hobby to be a great stress reliever after a long day of work.

I will be posting pics of all the old pennies, nickels and dimes I find. I like to go through whole boxes of coins every week. Sometimes I also grab some coin rolls from work and go through these as well. I usually look for wheat pennies, Jefferson nickles that are 1939-1959, buffalo nickles and any silver dimes or quarters. The nickles I plan on selling on eBay as they go for two to four times their face value. The pennies I tend to hoard but as my collection grows I will be selling everything to buy more valuable coins. Mostly I like to keep much older coins like Indian head pennies and mercury dimes. i want to build a collection of pre civil war coins that are in very good condition but not uncirculated. I also like buying gold coins.

I keep some foreign coins I find if they are older or if they are a higher value domination than if they were American coins. Usually the coin needs to be over 50 years old or be composed of a precious metal. Whether I keep them or not I will post images of everything i find here.

I will try to post a lot of updates on everything I find. i will also do posts that teach you more about the coin collecting hobby. Even when i sell things on eBay I will post links to the auctions from this blog. Hopefully you will find some interesting posts here that will help you learn how to earn some money from this hobby or just have some fun collecting and maintaining your coin treasure.

I will also be taking some of the old coins I find from coin roll hunting and setting them aside to give to my followers for free in future contests and fun projects. The coins I'm separating for this will be on my coins for a cure blog. These will be mostly giveaways. To be eligible for these giveaways you will need to be a member of my world community grid team. This is a disease research project that I am part of. It's a great way for anyone with a computer to help finding cures for diseases like cancer, HIV, Ebola and multiple sclerosis. There is also lots of other scientific research you can be a part of by running this program. You can install it on your computer or smart phone and it will run when you aren't using your system for other tasks. So if you are at work you can plug up your iPhone or android and let it run the program. It's very easy to set this program up but if you have any problems you can refer to this post I made on my personal blog.

If your mostly interested in the giveaways and free coins then you should follow my other blogs. I am using this blog to post about my hobby and will only be giving away a fourth of the coins I find through old coin roll hunting. In fact I might only give away closer to 10%. Basically this blog is to show how old coin roll hunting can be both fun and profitable.