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I thought some might be interested in the results of a newbie prospector. These results are from my first 5 weeks of prospecting and there is a good dose of beginner's luck in there (found 14 90% coins in one CWR).

Halves Searched
11 full boxes ($5500)
$1696.50 in loose halves or "loose" rolls from tellers

Quarters Searched
1 full box of quarters ($500)
$100 in CWR

Dimes Searched
3 full boxes ($750)
$50 in CWR

Finds
Halves: 19 - 90%
35 - 40%

Quarters: Diddly

Dimes: Squat

Of the 54 silver coins I found, three 40% and 1 90% were found in bank ordered boxes. The rest were found as loose coins and CWRs from the tellers. I searched a total of 24,293 coins with a find percentage of 0.21%.

It seems to be a time tradeoff between ordering/lugging/sorting full bank boxes and driving around to banks in order to ask enough tellers for coins. Another data point: I visited approximately 60-80 banks asking for any and all halves over this time period. Some of these requests resulted in full boxes but most were loose coins or handfuls of CWRs.

Overall it has been an interesting experience and I would recommend starting by asking all the banks in your area for any and all halves. Obviously this blanket approach of visiting as many banks as possible will only work once in an area. Then you will either have to develop a relationship with the employees, who will hold onto old coins for you, or order full boxes.

During my travels I have found that there is some competition in my area. There are at least two other prospectors near me but I was still able to make some good finds. I live in a highly populated area just outside of a major city which provides me with a large number of banks. YMMV.



Since I wrote this I searched one $500 box of halves and found seven 90% and one 40% in the box so the overall numbers are a little off.

Sounds like you have some decent luck there. I haven't done much searching with halves, only searched a few rolls here and there. No silver was found.

54 silvers out of 11 boxes - almost an average of 5 per box. I'd take it and run - I haven't done near that well as of late.

BamaJoe wrote:54 silvers out of 11 boxes - almost an average of 5 per box. I'd take it and run - I haven't done near that well as of late.

There was more than just 11 boxes there. The easy part was the 11 boxes.

The more time consuming and much more profitable way to find silver has been to ask the tellers and hit as many banks as possible. I don't think that I will be continuing to do this much in the future. I have a few select banks that I will check periodically for CWRs but other than that its just too time consuming to visit all these banks.

I will be ordering a few bank boxes per week from now on and accept the lower find percentages.

I wish that I had that kind of bankroll to order such quantities of coins.

SilverDragon72 wrote:I wish that I had that kind of bankroll to order such quantities of coins.

Its all about management and timing of the orseta and deposits. I was using about 3k at any one time.