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Do people that melt at least check first for rarer coins, ie s and d's, prior to melting? It sucks knowing that rarer coins may just get melted solely for being silver, etc.

Adam Youngs just breaks open the slabs and throws em in the furnace. They just aint worth dealing with

Wow, that's a shame.

Thogey wrote:Adam Youngs just breaks open the slabs and throws em in the furnace. They just aint worth dealing with

real answer is that any rational individual is going to check for key dates and conditional rarities, but corporate refineries are not.

I've seen Adam Youngs toss whole slabs in the furnace......5 gal bucket at a time.

This subject was brought up in the book The Big Silver Melt, by Henry A. Merton. This is a classic book written in the early 80's loaded with war stories about the melting of silver. In the book they cover the notion that certain dates were melted because silver got so high in price (especially in January, 1980) that people were booking HUGE profits on things they had held for years. Myself I remember selling silver a few months before that and sold off all my crappy stuff. On the morning of Saturday, January 5, 1980 I had round two of selling silver and sold a few slightly better dates because the price had just gotten so high. All my junk silver went out the door that day after about a one hour debate at the dining room table with my brother.

The silver melt book (which has been available on and off at the Copper Cave site for a while- Nate from the Copper Cave is a member of this site) mentions certain dates that it feels are worth much more than people realize. One is the 1958-P Washington quarter. I bought an uncirculated roll of them for slightly more than melt a while back.

So if someone were to promote some of these dates to a wide audience, prices for certain dates could go up sharply. Dealers were going through so much silver that there often wasn't time to search bags carefully. Refiners were backed up for months and dealers had to adjust actual buy prices down to account for the potential risk in holding something for months that they could lose money on when they sold (or they could have had a futures account- much more complicated subject- not sure if many dealers had futures accounts circa 1980).

Another factor- some dealers had rules of thumb that they gave employees who did look quickly through bags. For example, one could have easily said something like "All Barber dimes without mint marks from 1897 through 1916 get melted unless they are in really high condition. If it is average circulated, just melt it.

I suspect some did the same thing with Barber quarters. Then, around 5-10 years ago the 1905 Barber quarters (all mints) suddenly went up sharply in price. I imagine somebody did an exhaustive study to determine what percent were melted and concluded that they were much more scarce than people realized.

The same is likely true for Morgan and Peace dollars, but silver dollars are so heavily collected by so many people that it would be difficult to find anything earth shattering here.

Update: I see you can get the book (Big Silver Melt) at www.coppercave.com for around $30 including shipping. That is a bargain. The only one I see on Amazon costs OVER $900- they are hard books to get. I'd like to have a few extras on hand to loan to friends from time to time, but I only have one copy and it will not be pried from my hands until I'm a dead man!

Word to the wise- buy one or a few from Nate at Copper Cave while you can. This would make a GREAT Christmas present to yourself. A VERY enjoyable and easy book to read. I would seriously love to see it made into a movie- it was THAT GOOD.