by LongJohnCopper » Fri Jun 07, 2013 12:03 pm
We do not have the option of bags of coin at my home, located 50 miles away from nowhere, so all my hand-sorting, which is to say all of my sorting, is done with rolls. Ditto with the dump market, which demands rolls only be returned. At one time years ago I destroyed the shotgun rolls to get them open quickly, but eventually tired of paying even a portion of the excess value of one piece of discovered copper for a new wrapper, so I developed means to re-use the wrappers.
I generally use something on the order of a flat, vane-type screwdriver, smaller blade, with edges rounded (if the edge of the blade is sharp, it tends to puncture the wrapper). I work the blade under the curl of the crimp at one end, alternately poking and prying upward in various adjacent spots until the tight roll of the crimp starts to unravel up and away from the stack of cents. I then work my way around the inside of the circumference, lightly prying upward to continue the unraveling of the crimp, until the entire crimp is undone and open.
I next fetch a dowel rod of roughly 5/8" diameter, or just under the diameter of the cents, and lightly gripping the roll with one hand, push the stack of cents from the still-crimped end opposite of my attentions thus far. If the wrapper encircles the stack of cents with a normal amount of pressure, it is possible to extrude the stack from the open end with the carefully-applied pressure from the dowel rod. If the wrapper grips the stack too tightly, a bit of water on the palm and fingers of the gripping hand produces more friction against the wrapper without more gripping pressure (which tends to further fight the willingness of the stack to move).
The resulting empty wrapper can be re-loaded with appropriately segregated cents for storage or dumping. I generally find that it is wise to add a short stack of 10 to 25 cents first, then ramming these home, musket-style, seating them at the factory-crimped end, before adding the balance of the stack to make up a full new roll. The open end can be folded back to some semblance of a closed end. Depending upon the centering of the original roll (and the number of squat, year 2000 cents there are), there may or may not be enough paper wrapper extending beyond the stack to permit a refold to approach the certainty of, say, that of a standard flat wrapper. Too little excess for folding - more a problem when working with shotgun rolls of nickels - leaves a sloppy, partially unfurling result which requires a strip of tape to remedy - and again, I don't like to give up even a portion of the value of a single CU cent!
At one time I unfurled both ends of the shotgun roll, eliminating the work with the dowel, and even now, if the stack contains a particularly damaged example in its contents, the normal smooth circumference of a cent degraded into an angry jagged ring, it may not be possible to extrude the stack without damage to the wrapper. An unfurled wrapper is certainly easier to store in quantity, if that is deemed a desirable end, but then in order to reuse the completely unfurled wrapper I have to fetch out my banker's tray to be able to re-roll a new stack. And now both ends will bear the less-dependable refolding scheme, doubling the chance that I might have to employ tape to really secure it.
-John-