BEST. BAG. EVER.

[uthminsta]

Went to pick up two $50 penny bags today. They said they had more but I only had $100 so I just got the two. (yeah, I know)

First bag was good on copper, looks like over 20%. Eleven wheats, oldest was 1927.

I'm thinkin, if I get these cashed in early tomorrow, I can maybe go buy the other bags before they ship them off on Friday. So it's on to bag two.

My habit is to roll the side of the bag down so I can feed handfuls into the Ryedale with my left hand as I watch the rejects and cherrypick with my right hand. But as I rolled the bag down, I noticed a wheat. Cool. There's another. Waitaminit, there are 3 more! I found 7 wheats on the top of the bag, so I shifted it a little to the side to get a better look, and saw several more. So I grabbed a handful and almost all of them were wheats.

Hmmm...

I decided to go ahead and run them through the Ryedale and pick through the copper later. But as they ran, I had to keep picking old wheats out of the zinc rejects! Over and over! Each time that happened, I just threw them all into the copper bucket. Which was filling up quite nicely.

Decided to re-run the zincs so they would all roll past my eyes again, just to see if I missed any. I don't ever do that, but tonight seemed like a pretty good exception to that rule. Only thing in the copper bucket was a lonely 1980.

Dumped the zincs into a separate but identical bucket to the one I had used for the first bag, and it was WAY lower than the zincolns from the other bucket.

Now to run just the good stuff through again, to see which ones are "rejected." This will give me a pretty good sample to see what dates might be more likely to set it off.

Best bag ever. More to come.

[uthminsta]

Tonight's update:
I ran all the wheats and other copper through the Ryedale again, and had a sizable pile of stuff that got "rejected."
39 pre-1940, including several in the teens and a 1909 plain.
30 ranging from 1940-1942.
7 more "late" wheats: 44, 45, 46s, 48, 53d, 53d, 56d. The 1944 only weighs 2.3 grams.
1939 and 1940 Canadian cents.

Hoping to go through the rest of the stuff tomorrow... that's a mound of wheats...

[jacer333]

Jackpot! Congrats on the nice haul

[dakota1955]

it's nice to get a score like that once in a while

[uthminsta]

Someone eventually says "go back and buy everything they have." Well I talked to my wife last night about going back and buying the rest of their cent bags. Then I woke up early this morning thinking "I should buy their dime and quarter and half bags instead!"

So I got up and called the bank and left a message before they even opened. Then called again right as they opened at 8:30. They have already packed up all their bags to be shipped, even though they don't get them picked up until Friday. So no luck getting anything else that has already dropped.

Next step is to go in on my lunch hour maybe? And ask to get the NEXT of each of the bags that drop, just in case there's anything still in their machine from this same person's change. It's a lobby counter, so they get a lot of people bringing stuff in. And the employees don't ever see any of the coins, at least in theory. They go from the customer to the machine, and in the bag to the vault. Then from the vault to the Brinks truck... unless I "intervene."

Still hoping to score some silver through this... it's hard not to get my hopes up. It's hard not to lament "the one that got away." But shoot, this is a LOT of wheats!

And the best part is my daughters both got up while the wife and I were dealing with this... and started looking at the big tray of unsorted copper. #1 started picking the wheats out, and I told her we would do that TOGETHER after I got home from work. #2 just said "Cooool!" So tonight after work we are going to sort out all the wheats... like I said... together. That's more valuable than anything else.

[TheJonasCollegeFund]

Best bag for me had 700+ wheats. But you never know when you're gonna hit one like that.....so grab every one you can.

[Lemon Thrower]

i once bought a partial bag of halves that had 14 40's and 3 90s.

[Sheba]

"And the best part is my daughters both got up while the wife and I were dealing with this... and started looking at the big tray of unsorted copper. #1 started picking the wheats out, and I told her we would do that TOGETHER after I got home from work. #2 just said "Cooool!" So tonight after work we are going to sort out all the wheats... like I said... together. That's more valuable than anything else."


Wow!! That's absolutely true. Congrats on the find, but lots more congrats on the family. What a blessing!!

[RichardPenny43]

Nice score!
I still can't get anyone to sell me bags
My best box had 120 wheats, I had to turn off the ryedale and hand sort that one

[handsorter]

I hope I can be so fortunate as that someday. I go through around 100 bags of pennies per year, and have yet to find more than 40 wheats per bag. Usually 15-25. But my CU percentages are pretty good. Generally averaging 26%, and I don't keep ANY 1982s (because I hand sort). I still have hopes (ok--dreams that someday I will find a 1909 SVDB, and a 1955 D Double Die (I did find a 1909 S in circulation!).

[uthminsta]

Big update. At least one more update to come. Sorted out the wheats by decade last night with kid #1 (until bedtime) and then with the wife:
643 from the 1950's, 546 from the 1940's, and 55 pre-1940. More details on the pre-40 stuff when I get a chance to go through them in detail with the books, but there are a few better dates. No 14D or 31S or anything, but still. The 1909 is nice, problem free, will look nice in my collection.

1244 total wheats - that means this bag had nearly 25% wheats! And a lot more copper from the "memorial pile" - should be about 850 - I will be going through those in a few days, rolling them up. So then I can get a total/final count for this bag. The zinc return was exactly $29.00 and they handed one bent zincoln back to me.

Oh I forgot... there were 3 or 4 George VI Canadians. And several early Elizabeths.

[TJMatt]

Great bag! Congrats on the score. To bad you weren't able to ge the bags off of the higher denominations. I would have loved to hear that story!

[uthminsta]

There is more to that story. Sort of bittersweet. Will write that chapter later... I'm about to take my wife out on our first date in... way too long.

[uthminsta]

Better Lincolns included 1909, 1932, 1932D.
Canadians 1939, 1940, 1944... and about a dozen later dates.
Will post a full list of the pre-40s on the tracking thread soon: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16719

So anyway, as I already said, I called the bank Thursday morning, and all their stuff was already packaged up for the Friday shipment. But then that afternoon I went in to ask if I could get the next bag of each denomination that dropped off the machine. They replied that most generally, bags that drop (besides cents) are taken into the back room and hand-rolled, then used to give change orders for their customers. So I can't buy anything besides cents from them.
So I got that awful sinking feeling that there was probably thousands of dollars worth of silver, all rolled up and sold at face value to the local burger joint or something. HOWEVER, they quickly dispelled this fear, by saying "We didn't find anything out of the ordinary when we rolled it. We only found a couple silver dimes." To which of course I replied, "So you have some collectors working here at the bank?" And she nodded... and grinned... ugh. Paradigm shift.
So like I said, it's BITTERSWEET. At least I didn't miss out on some MAJOR silver score. But now I know for sure... these tellers search for silver.

[SilverDragon72]

Best bag for me had 700+ wheats. But you never know when you're gonna hit one like that.....so grab every one you can.

Wow! Here I thought the 8 wheats I found in my box tonight was alot...yikes!

[Derek.Sheriff]

Sure would be nice if I could buy bags instead of rolls here in Phoenix. Anyone have any suggestions?

[uthminsta]

Where do you dump your rejects? At banks with automated counters? If so, perhaps one of them could become a source bank. Of course, you would have to weigh the value of gaining a possible bag source versus the loss of a dump bank.