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help me with my math.

if a 90% half dollar is 12.5 grams, two would be 25 grams. A $1,000 face bag would be 25,000 grams.

90% of 25,000 is 22,500 g silver

22,500 / 31.1034768 is 723.39 troy ounces

so if the convention is 715 troy oz, they assume an average roll is 715/723.39 = 98.84% of BU, or 247.1 grams. So anything under 247.1 grams is "light."?

Absolutely!! And, it's getting lighter and lighter as the AU-BU SILVER coins are being removed from the junk SILVER. Folks are getting ripped on the light weight bags.

IMHO, ALL JUNK SILVER should be weighed from here on out. I think that is how it should be sold too. A fair price might be JUNK SILVER sold at spot for the weight of the coins in the bag. Weigh the coins, multiply by .900, and multiply by SILVER spot. That way it wouldn't matter if the bag contained slicks, average circulated, or BUs. You'd get what you paid for.

If future SILVER prices are any higher from here, you just got to weigh the coins (unless you can see that they're all bright and shiny). I think the old 715 standard has to go. Maybe, we can start a new standard here on RealCent - ALL JUNK SILVER MUST BE WEIGHED.

BU silver is 723 ounces, most modern halves, quarters, or dimes bags will contain close to that figure. If you buy Mercs or Walkers, Standing Libs, or Barbers... then you are losing as much as 7 - 11% (with the Barbers, less with the others). Does the numismatic desirability make up for your loss of ounces? People still pay premiums above melt for older coins, so apparently they think so now. Will that hold true when silver is ten times the present price (two years from now)? Probably not. You will soon see the marketplace adopt the new standards Country suggests, just let the price rise significantly and it will take place. However, think about this. Even at the present price of gold, fractional pre-1933 gold is price-based on condition (VF, XF, AU, BU) and not on weight. I do see the dealers, however, selling you junk now at 715... then buying it back a few years later at weight... which might be 700, 690 etc.

A very good arguement! It's really got me thinking about how I buy 90 and 40 %. I hate when a slick slips in the batch and this sounds like a true fair way to know what your getting every time. Thanks for opening my eyes.

well, when you buy junk its priced as a multiple of face so you get what you pay for. that said, its a question of what to keep and what to thin.

Are there any big time dealers that sell by weight instead of face?

davycoppitt wrote:Are there any big time dealers that sell by weight instead of face?

I don't know of any at this time. But, if you sell a light bag to a dealer, I'm sure they'd tell you.

Maybe Market Harmony can shed some light on this subject....

I buy on weight and also by face value. Some people understand weight, but those that give me the glazed over look, I just simplify it but saying X face...

As for selling, it depends on the buyer, but I typically just sell by face value. I don't do running total on the bags that I sell, but count it up when I ship it off. I do not count dimes... just weigh them out in grams and divide by 24.6 to get face value

thanks for the replies guys.

davycoppitt wrote:Are there any big time dealers that sell by weight instead of face?

No, there isn't. Even when silver was $50 and people were melting it like crazy it never was sold by weight. They already are taking off 8 ounces for wear and tear so unless you get/have a really slim/worn bag things will equal out.

Also the 715 number wasn't just made out of thin air. Several 90% bags were melted and calculated so thats how the number came to be.

highroller4321 wrote:

davycoppitt wrote:Are there any big time dealers that sell by weight instead of face?

No, there isn't. Even when silver was $50 and people were melting it like crazy it never was sold by weight. They already are taking off 8 ounces for wear and tear so unless you get/have a really slim/worn bag things will equal out.

Also the 715 number wasn't just made out of thin air. Several 90% bags were melted and calculated so thats how the number came to be.

That may be true. But in the early '70s, there were plenty of BU coins included in the bags. Large amounts of '62, '63, '64s were just thrown in with the rest. Nowadays, when do you every see BUs in your bag? In fact, some of the bags you got in the old days were mostly BU bags of later date SILVER coins. More than likely, the good stuff has been culled out over the last 30 years, leaving worn coins as the base of the junk SILVER. That is why I think the standard no longer is any good. The coins have to weighed to give the buyer a fair chance.

The standard assumes about a 1.5% wear factor from the mint state coin. While this may be true for 90% JFKs and Franklins, it won't hold water on the quarters and dimes, which were heavily circulated. Worn Roosevelt dimes will show a 5-8% wear factor, and worn Washington quarters similar numbers. I'd bet many bags of junk are at least 3% less weight than what you would expect with the standard. In the old days, they dumped the BU coins in to make up for the worn coins in the bag.

Don't you think we need to new standard these days?

Country wrote:

highroller4321 wrote:

davycoppitt wrote:Are there any big time dealers that sell by weight instead of face?

No, there isn't. Even when silver was $50 and people were melting it like crazy it never was sold by weight. They already are taking off 8 ounces for wear and tear so unless you get/have a really slim/worn bag things will equal out.

Also the 715 number wasn't just made out of thin air. Several 90% bags were melted and calculated so thats how the number came to be.

That may be true. But in the early '70s, there were plenty of BU coins included in the bags. Large amounts of '62, '63, '64s were just thrown in with the rest. Nowadays, when do you every see BUs in your bag? In fact, some of the bags you got in the old days were mostly BU bags of later date SILVER coins. More than likely, the good stuff has been culled out over the last 30 years, leaving worn coins as the base of the junk SILVER. That is why I think the standard no longer is any good. The coins have to weighed to give the buyer a fair chance.

The standard assumes about a 1.5% wear factor from the mint state coin. While this may be true for 90% JFKs and Franklins, it won't hold water on the quarters and dimes, which were heavily circulated. Worn Roosevelt dimes will show a 5-8% wear factor, and worn Washington quarters similar numbers. I'd bet many bags of junk are at least 3% less weight than what you would expect with the standard. In the old days, they dumped the BU coins in to make up for the worn coins in the bag.

Don't you think we need to new standard these days?

Yes, but there most likely was a lot more mercs and standling libs that got melted down then there will be today. Most of what you will see is washington quarters and roosies with a few libs and mercs. Yes, there are whole bags of mercs and stuff but they always have a small numismatic premium attached to them anyway.



I am not saying there shouldn't be a different standard. I just know how things are done and have the basis on why they are done that way.


What do you purpose the standard be?

Buy and Sell junk SILVER by weight - everything weighed so you know how many ounces of SILVER you get. No more light bags. Seems fair to me.

While it may be impractable to weigh small quantities of coins, larger quantities could be bought and sold by the pound. Keep it simple, weigh the bag on a scale, and then pay for what you get.

At what point do folks realize that the SILVER has to be weighed? $30? $50? I think the current price of SILVER justifies the time spent weighing. At a higher SILVER spot price, it's got to be mandatory.

Country wrote:Buy and Sell junk SILVER by weight - everything weighed so you know how many ounces of SILVER you get. No more light bags. Seems fair to me.

While it may be impractable to weigh small quantities of coins, larger quantities could be bought and sold by the pound. Keep it simple, weigh the bag on a scale, and then pay for what you get.

At what point do folks realize that the SILVER has to be weighed? $30? $50? I think the current price of SILVER justifies the time spent weighing. At a higher SILVER spot price, it's got to be mandatory.

SO total weight * .9 * spot = silver value?

I am sure you will run into the issue of people making their scales read less....but there is fraud in whatever system a person chooses.

Country wrote:IMHO, ALL JUNK SILVER should be weighed from here on out. I think that is how it should be sold too.

Country wrote:I think the old 715 standard has to go. Maybe, we can start a new standard here on RealCent - ALL JUNK SILVER MUST BE WEIGHED.

How do you present this idea to coin shops? The coin shops around here have high markups (especially now!!!) and charge sales tax.

highroller4321 wrote:I am sure you will run into the issue of people making their scales read less....but there is fraud in whatever system a person chooses.

you mean the people buying silver make their scales weigh less, and when selling it use a scale that weighs more.

Refineries have only small degree of weight tolerance when accepting bags of junk silver. All are tossed on the scale. Too many slicks and the seller is penalized.

Most I know who are selling bags usually toss in 1964 Kennedys or heavily tarnished BUs to offset a larger than number of slicks and well worn coins just to compensate for the difference.

It is coming down to the weight of the bag. Just because there truly is $1000 face of junk silver in the bag doesnt mean the corresponding weight is there to match. People will get more and more serious about this as the silver price continues to climb. Justifiably so, in my opinion.

You have to continuously cull your coins to ensure you won't lose value when it's time to sell. Most stuff you buy off ebay has heavy wear. I pull coins like that and sell them back to the online dealers on price spikes, while they still pay face value for them. It's Gresham's Law applied to it's most thorough extent.

the 715 standard is great as long as you understand it.

people including dealers sell you coins without weighing them!

i went through all my 90% and sorted it into $10 bags, then weighed it. anything that is overweight i am keeping. anything underweight is first in line to be sold or traded to the dealer for gold.

yes i have traded to a dealer light bags in terms of ounces but full face value and no he didn't weigh it.

Lemon Thrower wrote:

yes i have traded to a dealer light bags in terms of ounces but full face value and no he didn't weigh it.

I feel absolutely no compunction at selling worn coins back to APMEX. That's where most of mine came from in the first place. I am not making money off them, I am merely breaking even. I think most of us do the same thing.

I pulled all of my slick quarters (all SLQ's) and sold them on feebay and made a little extra and used that to buy Washingtons on the last dip. I need to go through my dimes now and do the same.