Is 20% worth it? I'm making $3.75 per hour.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

Its interesting to hear all your opinions on sorting, and your motives for doing this.
How long you plan to hold. When you do your sorting, percentages found, ect.
Its funny to me even the smart alec replies...as if some are offended I pointed out the profits are low.
That wasnt unexpected, it is forgiven.


Copper went up a dime today on tightening supply.
Sooner or later China is going to have to buy more.
Yes, I want to profit also. But patience is key.
Meanwhile the sorting and finding is fun, if not the dumping and getting the boxes.

Hello Clint! er.. I mean Finder! Edit: (Whoa! Clint... what the hell happened to your face?!)

We have had this conversation at least twice before in the last nine months. My thread was just a little while back and you missed it. (Yeah, I got a few of them riled too.) The truth is they are not copper cents. They are brass cents and that is how you will sell them to a scrap yard when the time is right... You will be lucky if they pay you at #2 copper rates. Or, maybe you can pull a P.T. Barnum and sell them on feeBay ("there is a sucker born every minute"!)

Two years ago, I did some work for the president of the largest scrap metal company in my state. They cover a six state area. When I told him how and why I was starting to hoard brass pennies... he looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

All that being said, you are far better off holding brass cents than paper FRN's (Federal Reserve Notes) aka "I owe you nothing" notes. Think long term. Very long term and one day you will be pleased you hung onto them.

Like I said earlier, finding silver in the wild is a lot more fun (for me).

[Tourney64]

Lincoln Cent top 50 errors - http://www.lincolncentresource.com/Top50.html

[Finder]

Tell me more about your silver hunting. How are your results? What do you search? Dime rolls?

From what I hear there isnt much left out there?

I did recently find a silver dime, in the work break room change...

PS: #2 copper here is paying $3.24 a lb. Thats less than 3 rolls or $1.50 face as you know. A 100% profit as of todays price, not bad at all.
Wish they would take them for #2...I could cut ebay fees, paypal fees, and coinstar fees in one fell swoop and realize 100% profit immediately.

[Finder]

Lincoln Cent top 50 errors - http://www.lincolncentresource.com/Top50.html

Thank you Tourney, I appreciate it.

Mine looks just like this:

http://www.lincolncentresource.com/RPMS/1960rpm1.html

[Common Cents]

Do the math at $10/lb. CU and get back to me.

Give it a few years and we'll be above this mark. Watch what increasing energy prices do to copper. It will impact the price in two distinct ways. First it will increase the overhead costs for copper miners greatly. Those mega-trucks carrying hundreds of tons of ore aren't known for their great fuel efficiency! Secondly, the higher energy costs will increase demand for 'alternative' energy solutions such as solar, wind turbines and all sorts of other non-carbon energy sources which all require copper wiring of some type. Then consider economic factors like competitive currency devaluation taking place around the globe, and the specter of trade wars and tariffs being imposed on copper exports.

If I thought today's copper price was anything close to the ceiling, I wouldn't bother sorting. As others have noted, I'm planning on sitting on my small hoard for as long as it takes for the price to pop. Another factor to consider is that I enjoy the sorting. I'm sitting on my couch and listening to tunes. How many 'jobs' allow this?

Don't be short sighted in your analysis. Be willing to wait, and you'll be well rewarded for your efforts.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

Tell me more about your silver hunting. How are your results? What do you search? Dime rolls?From what I hear there isnt much left out there?

I did recently find a silver dime, in the work break room change...

PS: #2 copper here is paying $3.24 a lb. Thats less than 3 rolls or $1.50 face as you know. A 100% profit as of todays price, not bad at all.
Wish they would take them for #2...I could cut ebay fees, paypal fees, and coinstar fees in one fell swoop and realize 100% profit immediately.

Finder, just flip over to Country's "Tracking Threads". Country will give you a proper education!

[tinhorn]

I think our challenge is two-fold--to churn enough raw material, and figure out how to get full value for our product.

When I first stumbled across this site, and concept, I stopped at several banks to see 1) how tough it would be to buy large quantities of pennies, and 2) what my yield would be. Turns out my 27% yield equates to a 50% return on the money I invest in pennies at today's copper price. I decided to figure out a system that would work. I'm in the middle of the process, but am happy to share my ideas.

I'm reminded of when I got into the herb capsule business. My initial investment was in some basic hobbyist-level equipment--50 capsules at a time. Bleah. But when I bought a machine that processed 360 capsules a minute, then things started to make sense. Similarly, I can't hand-sort enough pennies to make the return on my time worthwhile, which is why I'm in the middle of a seat-of-the-pants engineering project turning an old sewing machine, some PVC pipe and other junk into an automated feeder for a couple sorting units bought off eBay. If I've done my calculations right, this contraption will sort enough pennies to make my gross about $25 an hour. If it works. And if I can sell my coppers for their full value (or more).

See, if I'd sold my herb capsules in gallon-size Ziploc bags, I'd have had to sell them at wholesale prices. (Kinda like selling coins worth 2.85 cents for 1.6 cents.) But by bottling them and slapping on a fancy label, I was able to sell a bottle for double my direct costs. Have you looked at the prices people are spending on "copper bullion" on eBay? And what is that bullion? Industrial lengths that are cut into small pieces and smacked with a stamp.

So I'm packaging my 150-gram-net-weight copper bullion into clear plastic tubes complete with safety seals and shiny labels. Haven't test-marketed yet, but if I can net the real value of the copper after all the fees and direct costs, I can live on $25 an hour. (And that's at half of the sewing machine's capability.)

[maoguinn]

......Right now in my area #2 copper is about $3.10 lb. This would throw your calculations way lower..........

Way lower? My post mentioned selling 5 pounds for $16 which is $3.20 lb. Pretty close if you ask me.

I'm sorry CardsNCoins I wasn't talking about your post, I was replying to Finder's post. I should have replied with a quote. My bad.

[CardsNCoins]

I'm sorry CardsNCoins I wasn't talking about your post, I was replying to Finder's post. I should have replied with a quote. My bad.

Absolutely no need to apologize, and sorry if my post seemed confrontational. It's hard to get the proper tone of a message to come across correctly through typing.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

So I'm packaging my 150-gram-net-weight [b]copper bullion into clear plastic tubes complete with safety seals and shiny labels[/b]. Haven't test-marketed yet, but if I can net the real value of the copper after all the fees and direct costs, I can live on $25 an hour. (And that's at half of the sewing machine's capability.)

"Copper bullion"??!! You were talking about sorting pennies and suddenly swithch to "copper bullion". Are you saying you are going to market rolls of pennies as "copper bullion"? HA! P.T. Barnum could not have done it any better!

Things have changed since P.T.'s day. There are truth in advertising laws out there now. You might check out what to print on those shiny labels with a lawyer.

[exbingoaddict]

Most hobbies cost money. This one can be profitable. As others, that how I view it. As a hobby for rainy days and cold winter nights. And again, it's the only hobby I've every profited from and holds some potential future returns. I gave up on the baseball card collection from my childhood years ago. Those aren’t going anywhere. Hey, speaking of which anybody want to trade gold/silver/copper for baseball cards?

[tinhorn]

So I'm packaging my 150-gram-net-weight [b]copper bullion into clear plastic tubes complete with safety seals and shiny labels[/b].)

"Copper bullion"??!! You were talking about sorting pennies and suddenly swithch to "copper bullion". Are you saying you are going to market rolls of pennies as "copper bullion"?

You're suggesting I should use the term "bullion coins" instead? Maybe you're right.

Bullion: Precious metals, including gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, that are traded based on their intrinsic metal value.

Bullion Coin: A precious metal coin whose market value is determined by its inherent precious metal content. They are bought and sold mainly for investment purposes.

http://bullion.nwtmint.com/articles_glossary.php

I'll ignore your insinuation that I intend to deceive anyone. I just think that there's a difference between cowpies in the field, and cowpies that have been processed and packaged as fertilizer. Same with the copper discs that so many are selling at little over half their value, while some consumers are paying 20 times the real value for copper bars. In OP's search for ways to make his sorting more profitable, I suggest that selling packaged fertilizer may be more profitable than selling piles of poop, and it may serve consumers better.

Since "bullion" seems to be a term reserved for precious metals, not base metals, applying it to copper in any form may be a stretch but it seems to define what all this sorting business is about. As reflected in the name of this very forum.

Or is "copper bullion" a term that should never be used at all?

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

Tinhorn, that was my attempt at sarcastic wit & humor.

Be careful how you market things. People will always remember what they thought you said, not what you actually said. That is why we have used contracts for thousands of years now. Even then, there is confusion.

Run it by a good lawyer so you can avoid a false advertising class action. After that, go for it!

[tinhorn]

Gotcha.

We're actually in a great position to inform consumers. I see copper on eBay being sold in troy weights, when copper is actually measured in avoirdupois. We can let folks know that a roll of coppers weighs no less than 150 grams, and that a roll of zincs can never weigh more than 125 grams. My intent is to create a tiny (four to a page) informative brochure to include with retail orders.

I believe that a fully-informed consumer is more likely to pay full value. It's always been the case in my previous ventures. Consumers also pay different prices for bulk wholesale and packaged retail products.

[68Camaro]

Digressing slightly, but on my non-certified 10 buck digital scale, zincs are always 125-126 g, and coppers are always 155-156 g. You can't "certify" a roll based on weight alone (you need weight and count), but a weight >156 means there are too many coins in a copper roll (and/or too many coins combined with one or more zinc), and a weight of 153 or less (154 is usually a problem as well, but there can be some light rolls due to wear) means there is something "wrong" with the roll, either too few coins or one or more zincs. If this is important, someone with a more precise certified scale could check these (there are many here at work but I've not bothered bringing rolls in to weigh; the scale I have has suited the immediate need). But it matches calcuations based on the nominal masses for the coins.

[tinhorn]

I think we've derailed the thread pretty well already. I hope OP is getting some useful input.

I've mostly just weighed the 82s. Zincs are very close--2.48 to 2.5 grams. but the coppers are all the way from 3.04 to 3.1. If I had a roll of lighweight coppers, it would weigh 152 grams plus the weight of the wrapper. I'm going to be labeling my rolls with a net weight of 150 grams for two reasons: 1) 150 is a nice round number very close to the minimum weight I can expect, and 2) if 49 of my bullion coins weigh an average of 3.07 grams, and the one-in-a-million zinc slips into the roll, the net weight of the coppers will still be over 150 grams, giving the customer the full label weight.

[68Camaro]

I think we've derailed the thread pretty well already. I hope OP is getting some useful input.

I've mostly just weighed the 82s. Zincs are very close--2.48 to 2.5 grams. but the coppers are all the way from 3.04 to 3.1. If I had a roll of lighweight coppers, it would weigh 152 grams plus the weight of the wrapper. I'm going to be labeling my rolls with a net weight of 150 grams for two reasons: 1) 150 is a nice round number very close to the minimum weight I can expect, and 2) if 49 of my bullion coins weigh an average of 3.07 grams, and the one-in-a-million zinc slips into the roll, the net weight of the coppers will still be over 150 grams, giving the customer the full label weight.

Yes we have.

This should really be in another thread, but I'll continue one more follow-up.

If you're weighing for selling, what you suggest is fine.

But if you're weighing for quality control, calling any roll that is 150 or greater all copper doesn't work. Even if I accept your spread on the mass of individual coppers (which I haven't checked because my home scale doesn't accurately measure to the hundreds), the odds of getting an entire roll of completely lightweights is so near to zero it is effectively zero. I've weighed hundreds (if not thousands) of rolls, and regardless of any mass scatter at the coin level (which I can't verify), by the time you create a randomized population, the lightest 50 coin copper roll I've ever seen has been 154. I've expressly disassembled and counted every roll I've encountered that weighed 154 or less, and only found one 154 gram roll that actually contained 50 coppers - the rest of them all had an issue (one or two zincs, typically). For a time I was weighing every 155 gram roll as a check, but never found one that wasn't 50 coins of all copper. I've never seen a 157 or 158 gram roll, but the couple of 159 gram rolls I checked had an extra coin in them.

Next time I get a few minutes, maybe this week, I'll take a random sample of coppers and zincs down to the lab and measure them on a tenth of a milligram calibrated scale. Unless someone else has already done this?

Following up, the wrappers I've got are in the 2/3 of a gram range. So a 156 gram roll fits with the mint theoretical copper penny weight of 3.11 grams times 50 = 155.5 g plus ~.67 = 156.17. Since my home scale only reads to the gram (~155.6-156.4 would read as 156), that all fits.

[henrysmedford]

As many of you know, my 14-year-old, developmentally delayed son Franklin is the official "penny sorter" of the family. It is one of the few activities which will hold his interest and occupy his time fruitfully. Because of his specialized abilities, he only pulls the wheat ears, foreigns, and oddities. I was trying to convince his younger brother, Theodore, in the value of pulling aside the copper pennies, which Franklin has difficulty identifying the dates. I offered Theodore 1/2 cent for each copper he located and pulled. Ten minutes quickly passed when, suddenly, Theodore abruptly halted his work.
Smartly, Theodore stated,
"It's easier to 'work' for Christmas and Birthday money than to work for 1/2 cent a copper."

While I have been excited to purchase one, patiently I waited for the recent purchase of a vintage Scan-O-Matic Coin Viewer. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rt=nc&nma=true&item=170586750613&si=Lgwqr4dL2ASVAc5wFYP8CMoAIUE%253D&viewitem=&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWNX%3AIT I am planning on using this tool to help Franklin sort the collectible coppers from the zanny zinc. In a nutshell, penny sorting as a hobby is priceless for Franklin and profitless for Theodore.

[68Camaro]

I'm fairly new to this forum, so didn't know this about you and your family. There seems to be a common thread that coin sorting satisfies something in our brains. (I'm an engineer.)

While a child of the 60s, I didn't recall this Scan-O-Matic, so found that interesting. Hope it works out. And Theodore certainly did the math fast - smart kid.

Rich

[TwoPenniesEarned]

A Ryedale Apprentice will increase your hourly "profit" to over $10. Do the math on how many hours you spend at it and seriously consider picking one up.

[ZigMeister]

So I'm packaging my 150-gram-net-weight [b]copper bullion into clear plastic tubes complete with safety seals and shiny labels[/b].)

"Copper bullion"??!! You were talking about sorting pennies and suddenly swithch to "copper bullion". Are you saying you are going to market rolls of pennies as "copper bullion"?

You're suggesting I should use the term "bullion coins" instead? Maybe you're right.

Bullion: Precious metals, including gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, that are traded based on their intrinsic metal value.

Bullion Coin: A precious metal coin whose market value is determined by its inherent precious metal content. They are bought and sold mainly for investment purposes.

http://bullion.nwtmint.com/articles_glossary.php

I'll ignore your insinuation that I intend to deceive anyone. I just think that there's a difference between cowpies in the field, and cowpies that have been processed and packaged as fertilizer. Same with the copper discs that so many are selling at little over half their value, while some consumers are paying 20 times the real value for copper bars. In OP's search for ways to make his sorting more profitable, I suggest that selling packaged fertilizer may be more profitable than selling piles of poop, and it may serve consumers better.

Since "bullion" seems to be a term reserved for precious metals, not base metals, applying it to copper in any form may be a stretch but it seems to define what all this sorting business is about. As reflected in the name of this very forum.

Or is "copper bullion" a term that should never be used at all?

I believe bullion also can apply to metals other than Precious Metals... Enclyclopedia Britannica has 2 definitions as follows:

"Definition of BULLION
1a : gold or silver considered as so much metal; specifically : uncoined gold or silver in bars or ingots. 1b : metal in the mass <lead bullion>"

Note that definition b shows bullion to apply to "metal in a mass" with their example being "lead bullion"...soo the term copper bullion is also a correct application of the word. There were many more references to bullion being applied to other than PMs when I researched the word several years ago. At 95% fine copper, the term bullion is appropriate IMHO.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

To Tinhorn & Zigmiester,

Flip this around to the other side of the trade.

Let's say you read an advertisement about copper bullion and the ad outlines all the good reasons to attempt wealth building via bullion accumulation just like all the other PM bullion ads do today.

You pay your hard earned money and expectantly wait for the bullion's arrival. Once it does you tear open the package just like a kid at Christmas hoping for the best and what do you see?... a small roll (150 gm) of lousy, stinkin' pennies!!

Come on! Are you going to tell me if that happened to you.... you would not feel ripped-off?!

[ZigMeister]

To Tinhorn & Zigmiester,

Flip this around to the other side of the trade.

Let's say you read an advertisement about copper bullion and the ad outlines all the good reasons to attempt wealth building via bullion accumulation just like all the other PM bullion ads do today.

You pay your hard earned money and expectantly wait for the bullion's arrival. Once it does you tear open the package just like a kid at Christmas hoping for the best and what do you see?... a small roll (150 gm) of lousy, stinkin' pennies!!

Come on! Are you going to tell me if that happened to you.... you would not feel ripped-off?!

I agree with you. But if the ad clearly and prominantly said that you were selling 1959-1982 US 95% copper cents then simply using the word "bullion" somewhere in the ad would be OK also. I was just trying to point out that the word "bullion" does not only apply to PM but also can apply to lead, copper, etc.

[Sheikh_yer_Bu'Tay]

To Tinhorn & Zigmiester,

Flip this around to the other side of the trade.

Let's say you read an advertisement about copper bullion and the ad outlines all the good reasons to attempt wealth building via bullion accumulation just like all the other PM bullion ads do today.

You pay your hard earned money and expectantly wait for the bullion's arrival. Once it does you tear open the package just like a kid at Christmas hoping for the best and what do you see?... a small roll (150 gm) of lousy, stinkin' pennies!!

Come on! Are you going to tell me if that happened to you.... you would not feel ripped-off?!

I agree with you. But if the ad clearly and prominantly said that you were selling 1959-1982 US 95% copper cents then simply using the word "bullion" somewhere in the ad would be OK also. I was just trying to point out that the word "bullion" does not only apply to PM but also can apply to lead, copper, etc.

Yes, you have a good point. IF done properly... you have the potential to make a lot of money at it.

[HoardCopperByTheTon]

Just found out the CoinMaster machine in my local Safeway grocery store can be used to generate Safeway gift cards. Looks like I will be eating for pennies the rest of the year!