My greatest find of all time!

[4A-GZE]

Here's the story... A couple years ago, I went to a known illegal dumping area near my college with my girlfriend at the time. We found four tool boxes left out there with padlocks on them and I decided to take them back to my dorm to pop them open and hopefully get some nice tools out of it.

I did not expect them all to be filled to the brim with rolls of coins.

This is my half of the silver; she has the rest. (at least I hope so... I warned her multiple times that silver is down in value and she should hold onto the coins for a while, but we haven't talked in years)

But anyway, the person who collected these must have been misinformed about nickels, as the vast majority of the coins were Jeffersons from all years pre-1965. There were also a few dozen rolls of pennies, only a handful of which were wheats. I still haven't cashed in all of the clad (a lot of it is too dirty for the machines to recognize, and I even clogged one with dust from the nickels) but the current count is about $700, split between the two of us, and I have something like 50lbs of mostly nickels left to clean and cash in.

I haven't gotten a precise weight on the silver, but there's way over $50.00 face value of the dimes alone.


Long story short, I just wanted to find some salvageable tools from the trash and found some coins worth thousands.
And the moral is: don't throw out a locked metal box without busting it open first.

 

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[ScubaDetector]

That bag marked silver nickels looks more like a bag of half dollars. I kind of like your moral of the story, however, I know of no detectorists that would think of tossing a locked tool box away that he or she found without examining it first! Interesting the pennies look to have dirt all over them and they were rolled.
Congrats on the find. That would be awesome. The only possible roll of coins I ever found was a pile of 39 buffalo nickels in the water off the end of a dock. That is the only explanation I could think of as to why they were in a pile.

One question that has me puzzled. You said 4 tool boxes filled to the brim? Must have been pretty small tool boxes? Your coins don't look like they would fill one. Where is the rest of the stash?? Want to share?

 

[4A-GZE]

That bag marked silver nickels looks more like a bag of half dollars. I kind of like your moral of the story, however, I know of no detectorists that would think of tossing a locked tool box away that he or she found without examining it first! Interesting the pennies look to have dirt all over them and they were rolled.
Congrats on the find. That would be awesome. The only possible roll of coins I ever found was a pile of 39 buffalo nickels in the water off the end of a dock. That is the only explanation I could think of as to why they were in a pile.

One question that has me puzzled. You said 4 tool boxes filled to the brim? Must have been pretty small tool boxes? Your coins don't look like they would fill one. Where is the rest of the stash?? Want to share?

That bag actually says "Super Nickels." Just because they're big. I didn't feel like giving them all proper labels.

And actually, there are no pennies in this picture. That dirty bag is all war nickels. That's what the clad ones look like, too, which is why it's been so difficult to cash them in.
The paper was deteriorated on most of the nickel rolls and I found a dead roach inside of one, stuck between the coins and the roll. So they were pretty nasty. I'm assuming they spent some time underwater and most of the dirt is just gunk from the rolls themselves.

The boxes weren't huge, but they weren't too small either. This is only half of the silver, and the majority of the coins were clad nickels and pennies which aren't pictured. It was probably only one box of interesting things (silver and a few rolls of buffalo nickels, which I forgot to mention) and the rest were clad. I'm kind of ticked at myself for not even thinking to take photos of the stuff before splitting it all up and cashing in on some of it.

 

[Peyton Manning]

sounds believeable to me

 

[ScubaDetector]

That bag actually says "Super Nickels." Just because they're big. I didn't feel like giving them all proper labels.

And actually, there are no pennies in this picture. That dirty bag is all war nickels. That's what the clad ones look like, too, which is why it's been so difficult to cash them in.
The paper was deteriorated on most of the nickel rolls and I found a dead roach inside of one, stuck between the coins and the roll. So they were pretty nasty. I'm assuming they spent some time underwater and most of the dirt is just gunk from the rolls themselves.

The boxes weren't huge, but they weren't too small either. This is only half of the silver, and the majority of the coins were clad nickels and pennies which aren't pictured. It was probably only one box of interesting things (silver and a few rolls of buffalo nickels, which I forgot to mention) and the rest were clad. I'm kind of ticked at myself for not even thinking to take photos of the stuff before splitting it all up and cashing in on some of it.

I think we all wish we would have taken pictures of some finds at one time or another. May I ask what a super nickel is? Looks larger than a quarter. Congrats on a once in a lifetime find for sure.

 

[Peyton Manning]

I hope they weren't stolen

 

[4A-GZE]

I hope they weren't stolen

That's a good point, actually. I'm not sure how I'd be able to find that out, though.

 

[ScubaDetector]

Anybody that would go through the trouble to steal 4 locked toolboxes would have busted them open to see what was inside and not just dump them in an illegal dumping area. I can't imagine what they would have weighed since full to the brim. IF they would have been stolen, it would have been from somebody that knew what might have been in them. My 2¢ as an ex officer.

And you wouldn't want to find out. You already spent some and gave half away. And as you said, it was years ago.

 

[4A-GZE]

Very true, thanks!

Also, to answer your question, a "Super Nickel" is a half dollar. I also labeled the bag of dimes as "Dwarf Albino Pennies."