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This is for our new handsorting members with questions about sorting 82's and if it's worth the time. I just finished a $50 bank bag that had 488 82's in there. I don't know why there was so many. That number is about 3 times the most I have ever got in a bag. The bright spot is that 383 were copper. That's over 7 and a 1/2 rolls of copper. It took all of 10 minutes to weigh them on my scale. These 82's add up. For some reason my area has lots of 82's by comparison to other handsorters here that report on the board. Copper is copper...make it easy on yourself...get a scale.

What scale did you pick up? I am in Canada and dont have that many 82s to deal with but I have a small bag that I need to check up on their CU status... Probably worth getting a scale for the long term...

Mine is digital jewelry scale. Made by Digiweigh. Got it on ebay for about $17 or $18. Plus it comes in handy weighing jewelry I find with my metal detector.

I think it's a good thing so many people throw the 82's back into the wild. There will come a day
many years from now when all we'll be mining for are the few copper 82's. I'll be in my 90's
and after having gone through several skunk boxes I'll finally come across that elusive 1982
copper and add it to the pile of keepers.

I hand sort a box of cents a week. I've found that 80-90% of the 1982's are copper. I'm guessing the mint made the switch to zinc late in the year...

TheJonasCollegeFund wrote:Mine is digital jewelry scale. Made by Digiweigh. Got it on ebay for about $17 or $18. Plus it comes in handy weighing jewelry I find with my metal detector.

Not to discourage people from getting a good digital scale, but it's not needed for this purpose. If you've got a tube of glue in the house and a zinc penny (and virtually any type of scrap items that will result in a small lever and a fulcrum, such as a wooden ice cream stick and an old pen body), you can quickly make the "teeter-totter" comparitor that has been discussed numerous times. It's at least as fast as using a scale; faster, in my opinion, as a scale takes a second or two to settle, while the teeter-totter indicates faster than that. And dead-nuts accurate.

Simple instructions for 68Camaros scale are here:

http://www.lincolncentresource.com/smalldates/1982.html

I never weigh mine, I just let the sorter decide if they are copper or not.
Most are copper.

I find on average 62 COPPER 1982's for each $25 box I sort. The COPPER 1982's add up. I box my COPPER 1982s together, separately from the 1959-1981 COPPERs.

In mid-1982, the penny's composition changed; the last all-copper cents were produced by the Denver Mint on October 22, 1982.

Some more info on 1982 pennies. How to test them without a scale:

http://lincolncentresource.com/smalldates/1982.html

Great minds think alike Country.

"Copper stockpiles monitored by the Shanghai Futures Exchange fell for the first time in four weeks, according to figures released today. "

I definitely weigh all my '82's after a day of hand sorting. I purchased a Triton T2 jewelry scale on ebay for $15 and I can weigh a hundred or so 82's at the end of the day in less than 5 minutes with 100% accuracy. When I first started hand sorting I would just throw my '82's back with the zincs--boy was that a mistake .

One of the points I was trying to make was the use of time. I never weigh one at a time with my scale unless it doesn't add up. It's simple math...if I throw 2 82's on the scale and it shows over 6+ grams...both are copper. When I throw 3 on there...it's gotta be more than 9+ grams. And, 4 should read 12+ grams....simple math. I have gone up to 8 at a time when my copper 82 percentaged are high. So, when the math doesn't add up, I simply start removing coins until I get a good reading and find the zincer. When the percentages dip into the 70's, I usually just do 3 at a time.

2 at a time...5.6+/- will be a copper and a zinc
2 at a time...5.0+/- will be two zincs
2 at a time...6.1+/- will be two coppers
3 at a time...8.6+/- will be two coppers and 1 zinc
3 at a time...8.1+/- will be two zinc and 1 copper
3 at a time...7.5+/- will be three zincs
3 at a time...9.2+/- will be three coppers

Most of the time I stick with 3 at a time because the copper 82 percentages have been slowly going down. When I first got my scale, I was averaging in the low 90's copper vs. zinc. But it has been down into the low 80's to the high 70's now.

I found a copper 82 D on the sidewalk on the way to work this morning.

Sorted about $10 of rolls the other day and found a lot of 82s which, more often than not, were copper.

I'm saving 82 for weighing. Have a smale scale bought at coin show. 3/4 way thru first 25 dollar box. I've found a canadian and a Wheat and understand dirty finger syndrom.

If you're handsorting without gloves and your fingers don't get dirty...you're doing something wrong.

After finding that penny this morning... I got lunch at the supermarket salad bar this afternoon. Sat down at a table to eat, took a bite, then looked up and saw an 81 D penny sitting on the napkin dispenser. On the way home I found 2 dimes (not silver) on the sidewalk. Apparently people are giving away money in Portland today. I should go take another walk )

traderchowder wrote:After finding that penny this morning... I got lunch at the supermarket salad bar this afternoon. Sat down at a table to eat, took a bite, then looked up and saw an 81 D penny sitting on the napkin dispenser. On the way home I found 2 dimes (not silver) on the sidewalk. Apparently people are giving away money in Portland today. I should go take another walk )

You'd be surprised....go get you a metal detector...change is everywhere. Here it's under snow and ice...you might have a longer hunting season $$$$!

Strange there are so many 82's surfacing recently. I handsort in the northeast and I've come across more 82's in the past month and a half then in the previous 8 months.

I was at my college bookstore on Wednesday to pick up some highly-overpriced learning materials. I spotted the reverse of what looked like a copper penny in the Take A Penny/Leave A Penny tray. I grabbed it, only to find out that it was a 1982. I know I could make a little extra just by grabbing some zincs out of each TAP/LAP tray I run across, but I remain consistent - I only take coppers. So, when the clerk wasn't looking, I gave it a quick flip, and I hear a beautiful ringing sound. By the time I caught it, my hand was already moving back to my pocket.

I was silly enough to discard all of my '82s when I first started sorting. After handsorting for a few years, I got wise and purchased a scale, like other members in this thread have said. But now, like Finder said, I just let the Ryedale do the job. But the moral of the story is, Never pitch a copper penny just because it's a hassle to weigh it!

I see them constantly.

82 was the single largest production year, >16M. Almost as many as the past 4 years 2007-2010 combined. Just at face value, something like 4% of all pennies should be 82s.

Percentage would be less than that actually due to 82s being old enough to have had their population reduced. But the point is, you *should* be seeing a lot of them.

TheJonasCollegeFund wrote:One of the points I was trying to make was the use of time. I never weigh one at a time with my scale unless it doesn't add up. It's simple math...if I throw 2 82's on the scale and it shows over 6+ grams...both are copper. When I throw 3 on there...it's gotta be more than 9+ grams. And, 4 should read 12+ grams....simple math. I have gone up to 8 at a time when my copper 82 percentaged are high. So, when the math doesn't add up, I simply start removing coins until I get a good reading and find the zincer. When the percentages dip into the 70's, I usually just do 3 at a time.

2 at a time...5.6+/- will be a copper and a zinc
2 at a time...5.0+/- will be two zincs
2 at a time...6.1+/- will be two coppers
3 at a time...8.6+/- will be two coppers and 1 zinc
3 at a time...8.1+/- will be two zinc and 1 copper
3 at a time...7.5+/- will be three zincs
3 at a time...9.2+/- will be three coppers

Most of the time I stick with 3 at a time because the copper 82 percentages have been slowly going down. When I first got my scale, I was averaging in the low 90's copper vs. zinc. But it has been down into the low 80's to the high 70's now.

This is almost exactly what I do with my scale except my method is that I put 'em on one at a time, about 1 a second until the number comes out too low. Then, I take the last one off, throw it in the zinc pile and keep putting them on one at a time. Once I get 10-12 coppers on there I take 'em all off and start over. Once I got all the way up to 13 coppers with out a zinc and I could have kept going except the pennies would start falling off if I had.

Before I got the scale, I threw back all the 82's, normally about 2 per roll...I can't believe I did that...I would have over 30 LBS of 82's copper now if I had kept all of them (at an approximate 90% copper for 82's in my area).

I use a digital food scale that my wife bought a few years back but never uses. It's dead on accurate when weighing more than ten or so pennies but struggles to accurately weigh one or two. It does work for determining coppers. But if I don't want to trouble with it I just flick them in the air. zziing!

Hurry up and get a Ryedale! Mine works great for this. Yes, spendy out the gate but man, takes the guesswork out of sorting the '82's! Besides, you can soon build up a collection and then sell off units of pennies to other investors to finance your new hobby.

Myspen - I would totally buy a Ryedale if I had a place to dump all the zincs. I hand sort and I use the Coinstar at the grocer now, but even $50 of zincs takes me a half hour. Also, Ryedales do well on the secondary market. You can use yours to get your tons of cents and then sell it for $300 bucks on Craigslist or eBay!!!

avg 200 1982's per 100.00 sorted over the course of two years of keeping stats.

Did my first search since the $50 bag with 383 copper 82's. I just finished 2 $25 string boxes. So, $50 more searched. I ended up with the usual average of 123 copper 82's and just 28 zinc ones. I'm still amazed at the number of 82's that were in that bag. I will be picking up the next bag from the bank. It had $30+ when I got the other bag. I get 1 bag a week from them. It's a smaller bank. My regular dump bank sends 10-15 bags to brinks every week. And, most of that is not mine. I want to think that someone was born in 1982 and was saving just 82's then turned them in with this so-so economy. We'll see with this next bag!