2013 End of the Year!

So I haven't been posting very much in the last few months as I have had a lot of personal changes and the weather hasn't really been conducive to a very frequent coin roll hunting campaign. Nonetheless, I kept going on.

This year, I've searched ~$12,000 and found 64 silver coins. That was a little bit less than half of my goal of searching $30,000 but I still view the year as successful.

2013 Totals		Value Searched	Silvers Found
Dimes		$6645	34
Half Dollars		$3,248	23
Quarters		$1,590	0
Nickels		$384	0
Pennies		$92	0
Total		$11,867	59

I'm going to stick with the $30,000 year goal and see if I can finally hit it!

Thanks, everyone and Happy New Year!

CRH 9/22/2013 : Nickels Aren't Always Made of Nickel!

I don't usually ask for nickel rolls from the bank too often since they're pretty involved to look through. Unlike quarters, dimes, and to some extent half dollars, nickels have to be date searched in order to find anything really of interest. That's because the nickel edge design hasn't changed since the late 1800's when they moved to the Liberty "V" nickel! Although you can sometimes find some cool things like Buffalo Nickels, Liberty "V" nickels, or the occasional 35% Silver "Wartime" nickels, you have to look through billions of 1964's and 1999's to get there. Literally, over 2.7 Billion nickels were minted with a 1964 mint year and about 2.3 Billion nickels were minted with a 1999 mint year. That's a lot of chaff for little reward. I did find a key date 1939-D nickel out of a roll once before, but it took a lot of tired eyes to come across it. I'm also figuring that someone else is coin roll hunting nickels in my area since I never come across anything very good.

I decided to grab a few customer wrapped rolls from one of my favorite banks figuring that I'd just try to "play the game and get lucky". When you're not searching any denomination particularly hard it's somehow seems more random. Oh well.

The teller was nice enough to tell me (pun?) that if I was searching for silver that I'd be happy with one of the rolls since he knew for a fact that it contained at least 1 Silver War Nickel. That's awesome! Finally a teller that doesn't take advantage of the fact that they get paid to sit there and coin roll hunt when they're not being pestered by annoying customers like me! I scooped up a small handful of his rolls and hurried home. When I peeled through the roll, I noticed a lot of reddish-orange color corrosion on most of the coins. That seemed a bit out of the ordinary. In that one roll that the teller pointed out I was able to get my first 35% Silver "War" Nickels of the year, both 1943-P.  You can tell that they are war nickels because they are the only nickels to feature the large P, D, or S  mint marks over the Monticello on the reverse! They are the lowest-value junk silver coin from the 20th century available to coin roll hunters today.

2 1943-P Silver War Nickels Found Searching Coin Rolls from the Bank!

Silver War Nickels have large P, D, or S Mint Marks on the Reverse

CRH 6/25/2013 : Proof in the Nickels!

I've been trying to mix it up a little bit and get some variety in the coins that I'm searching, so you might start seeing more posts about the nickel and penny roll hunting that I've been doing.

I do my best to hit the nickels, but I almost never find anything worth sharing with you guys. I am currently working on a completing a Whitman Jefferson Nickel book entirely from coin roll hunting and I do occasionally find coins for it, but they usually aren't too special -- for example, I did fill my 1954 S nickel hole today. Since starting this blog, I haven't found a silver war nickel! Talk about a bad streak! 

Today, I was only able to get my hands on $10 in nickel rolls from my bank and even that was harder than it should have been since they were running low on their coin stocks. 3 of the 5 rolls were customer wrapped rolls (CWRs) so that was pretty promising. I dug into them and found a super shiny 1982 nickel that caught my attention. Then, I noticed the S mintmark upon closer inspection. This is officially my first proof coin that I've ever found coin roll hunting! It has some scratches so it's unlikely that I can get any real premium on it but free proof coins are never a bad thing. That makes me wonder how many proofs I may have been missing from edge-hunting the other denominations. Nickel roll hunting forces you to closely look at all of the obverses and reverses, so you have a better shot of noticing these cool rarities. Proofs are one of the few cases of NIFC nickels!

Here's an iPhone photo of my 1982 S Proof nickel that I found searching nickel rolls!

1982 S Nickel Proof Coin Found Coin Roll Hunting

How often do you guys find proof coins while coin roll hunting?