This should bring in some extra traffic for this blog and increase our visibility in the search engines. If I can get linkbacks from more places like this it can be a huge help moving forward.
To begin this post I'm going to show you the three biggest finds I found from coin roll hunting $156 dollars worth of nickles. These bank rolls were a combination of machine rolls and customer returned change.
The biggest find was a 1938 Jefferson nickle. When I first saw this I thought it was an error coin because I have always thought the 1939 was the transitional date. I didn't know there was any such thing as a 1938 Jefferson nickle.
When I went online to do some research I got very excited when I saw the price range in values from $6 to $1800. I knew that based on the condition I would probably be looking at the lower range but I figured maybe I'd be looking at a twenty dollar coin or something like that. The fact that under 20 million of these were minted further convinced me that I had something very rare.
Then I went to check ebay and my hopes were crushed. There are many examples that look better than mine going for two or three dollars. I guess I should feel lucky just finding one of these but I sure wish it was in a little better condition. Here is a pic of the 1938
The next best find after this was two silver war nickles dated 1942-S and 1943-S. The 42 is fairly dinged up but finding two silvers in less than $200 worth of nickles is pretty sweet.
Before I go any further, here is proof that I went through $178 worth of nickles. As you can see some are machine rolled and some are customer returns.
I also have to make note of the 1939 Jefferson nickle I found. This is an exceptionally good looking coin considering what they usually look like when they come out of circulation. I'm not saying it looks fantastic, just better than normal.
Then we have the 1940s nonsilver Jefferson nickles. I'm not going to do detailed images of these. Just a birdseye view of the nineteen nickles I found in this decade group.
I decided not to post the 1950s I found today. I'm starting to think I should start putting everything after 1950 back into circulation. There are just too many of them floating around. I don't know if they will ever really increase in value.
At the end of the day this was not a bad hunt. I'm slowly but surely increasing my collection of Jefferson silver war nickles.
Yes it's true, this is the second time I've found a silver Washington quarter at a Wal-Mart coinstar kiosk. I have a job next to a Walmart so I try to check the coin star twice a day and it's been worth my troubles. I once found a handful of silver with three quarters and two dimes in it, all silver. You have to check these coin counters every time you walk by the or you'll miss out.
I don't know why these machines spit out the silver but they do. They also seem to have problems with steel wheat pennies. This 1964-D silver Washington Quarter may be the most common date but it's free so I'm not complaining. These coins are valued at five dollars each in average circulated condition and I see them selling for more than that on auction sites and at many local fleamarkets. Keep coin roll hunting but don't forget those easy finds in the change machines.
As I've said many times before, hunting through customer returned rolls is a roll of the dice. Sometimes you get very lucky and find part of someone's collection. In other cases like this one you find only a few wheat pennies and maybe an interesting coin or two. This was one of the former cases so this will not be a long post.
As you can see I only found 5 wheat pennies in this venture. They were a 1958-D, two 1946 no mint marks, a 1944-D and the best find was a 1936 no mint mark. I'm not going to post an image of all the wheaties but here is an image of the 1936 coin.
After that we have two Canadian pennies. I have started keeping any Canadian pennies I find that are 1965 or older because these coins were minted in smaller numbers compared to their American counterparts. These have dates of 1963 and 1964. Here is the image.
I also found 5 good to very fine condition Lincoln Memorial pennies in this hunt but I won't be posting a close up image of those. Three of them were 1962 with two having the D mint mark. All are in really good shape and worth keeping for their long term value.
That's all for today. This was not a great haul and the sad part is I'm getting ready to go through fifty dollars worth of customer returned rolls. Yes, that is 100 rolls. I'm not really looking forward to it after doing this one but they are all from various sources so let's hope for better results this time. Also I have something more interesting that I hope to show you tomorrow or at least by early next week so stay tuned.
So today I decided to attempt another customer return coin roll hunting adventure. I went through twelve dollars worth of bank rolls here and I found seven wheat pennies and eight older Lincoln Memorial cents from 1968 to the early 1978. I like to keep these older Lincoln pennies because the value is starting to go up and soon we will be getting good prices for coins that are in good to very fine condition. Most people are overlooking these coins but as wheat penny finds become even more rare you will have to find a way to make your coin roll hunting experience worth you investment of time and I think this is the way to do that. So let's jump in to the goodies I found.
First up we have the four 1940s wheat pennies that I found. The dates are 1941, 1942-D, 1944 and 1946-S. The 1946-S wheat penny looks really interesting to me. The Liberty letters are all off center and the I in 'in god we trust' is pushed down. I'm researching this to see if its a strike error but I have a feeling it's just a dye error and won't be worth anything. Here are the images.
And here is a closer look at the obverse side of the 1946S wheat penny I found. You can see that the lettering is all over the place in this one but I can't find any other example online. I believe it is just a grease error. I am still not very good at taking macro images but here it is.
That's pretty much it accept for the older Lincoln Memorial pennies. I'm not going to post them all here but I will show you the oldest one I found. It's a 1968D that I think would qualify as a very fine condition or at least a good condition coin.
That's all for today. I find that breaking my hunts up into smaller sizes helps me to manage these posts better. It means less finds per search but it takes the stress away from taking all the images for so many coins. I hope you don't mind. I do have a hundred dollar penny search that I'm working on for this blog. I'm only halfway done with that one and it's already becoming a pain. Keep on the lookout for it though, I know many of you will enjoy it.
I decided to tackle the huge backlog of bank rolls I collected after I cut my finger during the holidays. I couldn't do any coin roll hunting during this time but I've still kept doing pickups at the banks. Now I have several hundred dollars worth of pennies, nickels and dimes to go through.
Today I went through ten dollars worth of pennies. These are all customer returned bankrolls, the problem with these is that you can go through a lot of them and find absolutely nothing. Sometimes you are checking pennies that have already been searched by another collector, at other times you just get unlucky. However, once in awhile you get a good batch and find some really great coins. In these bankrolls I found four wheat pennies they are two 1955D copper pennies, one 1952S penny and a 1942 no mint mark.
I also got lucky and found two older Lincoln Memorial pennies that were in very fine condition or at least very lightly circulated to add to my collection. They are a 1959D and a 1976D. Not old enough to be worth anything yet but I'll hold onto them for awhile and see what they're worth when I retire in twenty years or so.
I just got finished coin roll hunting a $25 box of pennies I picked up from the bank. This box was about half machine rolled pennies and half customer returned pennies. Customer returned pennies are kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes you find some really cool things and at other times you are just going through coins that have been searched by another collector. I was just about halfway through this box, mostly opening up the customer returned rolls and I had only found two wheat pennies. I was getting very discouraged, thinking this would be one of those boxes that was a complete waste of my time with little to no value on the return investment of my time.
Then it happened, as I approach the halfway point I began to see two to five wheat pennies dropping in each single bankroll. By the time I was done I had a huge number of 1940s and 1950s old American wheat back pennies. I even had a few that were older than that. I ended up with 22 wheat pennies from the 1940s and 23 wheat pennies from the 1950s. Also there was one penny with so much surface erosion that I could not reasonably make out the date. Here are the images.
