Coppercrazy share some of your wisdom

[JimmerUSD]

So I think most of us that read the CRH section of this site know you do a lot of pennies(Ya I know a lot is an understatement). Anyway I am getting two boxes of pennies with the rest of my order this week. Like most I'm sure I was wondering what is your method for going about sorting all your cents?
Or anyone else if you sort cents.

 

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[sagittarius98]

I think by 2015 it'll be legual to melt US cents and nickels, and then by 2020 they'll stop the production of cents. Just my opinions though. Stock up on those coppers while you can! Haha

It will definitely be illegal to melt cents and nickels until they are withdrawn. From there, it depends how greedy the US government wants to be.

 

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[uncubano13]

Can we Legally melt down the Canadian pennies?

 

[Coppercrazy]

Can we Legally melt down the Canadian pennies?

Yeah of course

 

[uncubano13]

Yeah of course

Where can you do this at?!

 

[Coppercrazy]

Where can you do this at?!

I don't know to be honest. Maybe a scrap yard? You would have to accumulate a lot to sell them though. I'm going to keep mine or sell them on eBay.

 

[GMan00001]

For those looking for cent errors. Here are a couple of good reference sites with pictures of the errors.

A Comprehensive Web Encyclopedia of U.S. Copper Coinage
The Lincoln Cent Resource

I've only used the first one, but the second one looks good as well from a first glance.

When I used to look for errors (and I might again someday), here was my process:

Step 1)
Sort in one pass. Pull all the coins I wanted to keep (wheats, foreigns, etc.) into their separate piles. Also create a separate pile for each date/mintmark I am going to do error checks on. I always put time in date order just so they were easy to find. If you do enough, are consistent on which errors you look for, and arrange the piles in the same way, you don't necessarily need to even look at the piles when sorting them as it becomes second nature (at least it did for me).

Step 2)
For each of the potential error piles, line the coins up in an array (usually 5 or 10 wide) with each coin lined up with the side of the error up and the orientation the same and then use a loupe and scan each coin looking at the spot (or spots) where the error (or errors) could occur. By lining them up in this way I found that my overall search time seemed to be shortened.

Step 3)
For each error found, put it in one of of those 2x2 cardboard coin flips and label it with the error found.



I haven't been searching for errors for a few years now as I am focused more on pulling wheats. By removing error searching my time to search $50 was decreased dramatically as I no longer had to flip every coin over to read its date just read the date if the obverse is up or pick out the wheat ears if the reverse is up.

Good luck and happy hunting.

 

[sagittarius98]

Where can you do this at?!

It is legal in the US, don't know about Canada. You can do this at a scrapyard, but I would hold on to them for now since the price of copper is pretty low.