Clean (not cleaned) cents
Posted: Mon May 04, 2015 8:38 pmI haven't posted in the penny forum for awhile - time to do one.
To repeat some history, when I started with RC ~5 years ago I was hand-sorting cents at very low levels, then cranked it up to boxes, then cranked it up again to a hand-fed machine, then when I found a bank that would supply without complaint, went to a Ryedale and then spent a couple of years in moderate-to-heavy self-sorting - keeping it all for myself - no sales except some wheats.
But (and I've noted this here in the distant past) as time went on I found myself more and more discriminating as to the quality of the cents I was keeping, until the last year+ after machine sorting for the copper I was manually hand-sorting the coppers before saving them, and pulling out not just the really disgusting dirty abes but anything at all that had any spec on it (I drew the line at accepting one tiny bit of non-corrosion on one side only). I marked those bags separately, and while I kept the dirty stuff for awhile I eventually just took them back to the bank and dumped them for face.
So fast forward two years. I need to consolidate a bit, so I'm going back through the prior 3 years (2010-2012) of sorting, manually culling the bags during the time when I had not been discriminating. In the process I'm finding a fair number of wheats and Cdn that I had missed during the first go-round, so there is a reward in it besides the cleaner coin. I'm finding that I'm getting rid of about 60% of the copper, keeping about 40%.
When done I will have only 40% of the prior hoard, but it will be premium quality stuff. Not cleaned, but clean. Numi-class coin hunting fodder for the 59-82 period. Makes it more worth keeping, for me.
To repeat some history, when I started with RC ~5 years ago I was hand-sorting cents at very low levels, then cranked it up to boxes, then cranked it up again to a hand-fed machine, then when I found a bank that would supply without complaint, went to a Ryedale and then spent a couple of years in moderate-to-heavy self-sorting - keeping it all for myself - no sales except some wheats.
But (and I've noted this here in the distant past) as time went on I found myself more and more discriminating as to the quality of the cents I was keeping, until the last year+ after machine sorting for the copper I was manually hand-sorting the coppers before saving them, and pulling out not just the really disgusting dirty abes but anything at all that had any spec on it (I drew the line at accepting one tiny bit of non-corrosion on one side only). I marked those bags separately, and while I kept the dirty stuff for awhile I eventually just took them back to the bank and dumped them for face.
So fast forward two years. I need to consolidate a bit, so I'm going back through the prior 3 years (2010-2012) of sorting, manually culling the bags during the time when I had not been discriminating. In the process I'm finding a fair number of wheats and Cdn that I had missed during the first go-round, so there is a reward in it besides the cleaner coin. I'm finding that I'm getting rid of about 60% of the copper, keeping about 40%.
When done I will have only 40% of the prior hoard, but it will be premium quality stuff. Not cleaned, but clean. Numi-class coin hunting fodder for the 59-82 period. Makes it more worth keeping, for me.
