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Searching Memorial Lincoln bags
route66
Posts: 474 ✭
I have 35 different Lincoln Memorial sealed bags and want to start searching them for high grades. How do those of you who search bags go about it? There has got to be a better way than to just dump them out on a cloth on a table. Or maybe not. Do you use a loupe on most coins, or just eyeball. On another note, how popular do you think Memorials will be in 2008, when the series will probaly end? (as it is now) Steve
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Apropos of the coin posse/aka caca: "The longer he spoke of his honor, the tighter I held to my purse."
Check to see which varieties are known for the date before you start looking. Try to
identify each die pair early so you will spot any unknown varities and it will make look-
ing for gems much faster.
Dump the coins carefully and slide checked coins toward the right. Keepers should be
kept out of the way. Wash your hands well and often or wear rubber gloves. There
can be slightly different techniques dependent on date or the number of keepers. If
your checking a 1974 bag with no nice runs and no varieties you'll be able to cut a lot
of corners compared to say a nice '86 bag. Later date coins should be checked much
more carefully for since the chances of unreported varieties is much higher. It's probably
never worth the time to check every coin carefully since if there's one of something there
will be more and you can always go back and recheck. It's the same with gems; the pri-
mary goal is to get the best coin and most of the runner-ups so don't get hung up on
trying to decide if one is worth keeping. If you can't decide then pass it.
A bag can take as little as about twenty minutes and has never taken me longer than
about five hours. This may be a little sloppy but you won't really miss much doing it this
way. I always try to save a nice coin from each die pair even when they're awful. It's
partially as a "record" of the bag but also serves as a sort of low cost souvenir.
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Are you talking about the bags with 5000 cents? Four coins per second?
Apropos of the coin posse/aka caca: "The longer he spoke of his honor, the tighter I held to my purse."
<< <i><<A bag can take as little as about twenty minutes>>
Are you talking about the bags with 5000 cents? Four coins per second? >>
Cent bags are rarely so bad you can go through this fast but clad quarter bags were often this bad.
Most of the coins in a bag will be the output of only eight or ten die pairs over a short period of their
life. There will be a few stragglers and oddballs but if all the main dies represented are awful then
all you have to do is is move them out of the way to see if there's anything underneath. When they're
like this I'll usually just knock them off the table into a box.
It's possible to miss something doing it this quickly but the odds are you won't miss anything very im-
portant. And you certainly won't miss anything that is there in quantity.
Let's hear some other methods...
I have a couple fresh bags of '05 Ocean nickels to search through.
Haven't searched mint bags before.
Thanks!
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