by thripp » Sat Sep 01, 2012 12:03 pm
I started out double-sorting all the pennies, first with a copper penny and the sensitivity at minimum. Then I would sort the rejects with a zinc penny and the sensitivity turned up a third, and then the coppers with a copper penny and the sensitivity turned up a third. This works well but I was getting tired of it so I considered changing to doing the zinc sort first and then only sorting the rejects for copper, with the sensitivity turned up a third all the time. That way, I would only be double-sorting 20 or 25% of the pennies, and whatever was left over from both sorts would be older wheats, indian heads, mis-read coppers, stray zincs, corroded or mutilated coins, and steel Canadians.
I asked Andy about this and he said "I sort everything first with the 1/3 sensitivity and a zinc penny, then do the copper search. Not so much for the wear out factor of the machine, but mostly for the time savings."
So, this is what I do all the time now. It saves a lot of time, and I do get a lot of wheats, Indian Heads occasionally, and even dimes sometimes. There is some hand-searching at the end but it's less than 1% of the initial batch.