Copper

apush · Apr 10, 2010

How many folks out there keep copper cents? I go thru 2 boxes per week and find quite a bit. Not like the massive amounts I have seen posted!

Is it really worth hanging on to? Who buys copper cents? And how do you go about selling? Just wondering if this is something that should be considered--at least for this ol' gal. It would be nice to sell the copper and buy silver. Thanks for any responses. I read on a post someone has a "ton"--literally! I call that dedication.

apush :read2:

goldencoin · Apr 10, 2010

Nope, don't think it is quite worth my time to date check every cent. If you were going to do that, invest in a reydale and then it would be worth keeping copper

HH
-GC

ArkieBassMan · Apr 10, 2010

The last time I checked eBay, $50 worth of copper cents was selling for $70-$75. Some poster on here was getting $130 for that same amount awhile back when copper prices were higher.

obediah · Apr 11, 2010

I save copper wiring waste, it is much easier to sell, and get- from construction site dumpster piles too.

twinsrule · Apr 11, 2010

I keep my copper, but i still have most of the same questions you do. I'll be following this post.

mts · Apr 11, 2010

You currently can't melt down US copper pennies. But they still sell for a premium on eBay. I save copper cents and do a few boxes a month. The way I see it, copper is just another form of bullion. And since you can easily pick them up at less than what they are worth I figure they are worth keeping. At some point, those pennies are going to be worth 10 times what they are now. At that point you should easily be able to sell them for way above face value. Unfortunately, it takes a LOT of pennies to add up to a sizable amount of money. I'm looking to get a few hundred dollars worth (face value). I currently find that 25% of each box that I search are copper. And of course, the wheat pennies are worth slightly more.

I use my metal detector to sort them very quickly. That way I don't have to date check each one. It's certainly not as fast as a ryedale machine. But I can do more than one per second after I get them out of the wrapper.

mts · Apr 11, 2010

For what it's worth, I also don't think that you can sell them at today's prices and make a real profit. After all of the fees you pay for eBay, Paypal, and your time you wouldn't have anything left. But when those pennies are worth 5X face value it will be a completely different story. The only problem is that once the price goes that high you'll have everyone and their brother buying pennies so supply will be short and competition will be high. That's why it's best to search/save them now because the price is currently such that people can't make a good profit which means that there is less competition.

Now invariably you'll have someone come along who has bought a ryedale and will tell you that they make "X" number of dollars a week selling pennies on eBay. But if you really look at the effort involved and how much they pay in fees you'll likely see that they aren't making a killing. They would probably be better off holding on to them for a couple of years and then selling off when copper goes higher.

That's my two cents. :icon_thumright:

jim4silver · Apr 11, 2010

I don't CRH pennies and don't plan to. But what is cool is that when you cash them into the coin machine at the bank, you really cannot get ripped off. If the machine mistakes your pennies for any other denomination, you can only come out ahead. I stopped doing dimes after a short time because the machine kept counting them as pennies.

To all the penny hunters out there, what is the average number of wheats found in a box? I think it would be kind of fun to try and build a set of wheats from CRHer finds.

Jim

buffhunter · Apr 11, 2010

Using a Ryedale, I go thru $200 to $300 worth of pennies each week. we average 17-19% on copper, and wheats can be as low as 3 per box and my highest in one box was 411 wheats of which most of them were from the 1940's.

Time for this - it takes about 8 minutes to put a box of $25.00 thru the Ryedale. that include opening up all the rolls and dumping them in. I rerun the copper a second time using a zinc as the comparator, and that pulls any zincs that may have gone thru and also pulls a bunch of wheats. Takes about 30 minutes at the most to go thru the copper - not date checking, but pulling wheats, and then run the copper thru a DeLaRue counter, bag them up and stored away.

The zincs are put to the side and I usual go thru some each night for about an hour to 90 minutes and date check them. As i check the dates, the following dates are immediately checked for doubled dies - 1983P, 1984, 1995, and 1997. All 1982P zincs are later checked for Doubled Dies, and 1992P & D, 1998, 1999, and 2000 are later checked for Close and Wide AMs.

Codes · Apr 11, 2010

jim4silver said:
To all the penny hunters out there, what is the average number of wheats found in a box? I think it would be kind of fun to try and build a set of wheats from CRHer finds.

Last year I averaged 8.91 Wheats per box. This year I'm getting 10.5 per box.

Electronova · Apr 13, 2010

I do about 2 boxes per week and a get about 11 wheat cents per box.

As for the copper...anyone interested in buying 50 lbs of 95% copper pennies? Haha

obediah · Apr 13, 2010

It looks to me the feeBay fees consume ALL of the profit and then some on the copper pennies sold on Ebay.

Coins4Cheese · Apr 13, 2010

I keep the copper cents that I find. Right now I have around $60 in copper.

mts · Apr 14, 2010

I had a nice box of pennies today. It took me about an hour and a half to separate them all and then tabulate the results. They were 29.76% copper which is much higher than the 25% that I typically get. There were 13 wheats and 6 Canadian coppers.

So with today's copper price and assuming wheat cents are worth about 4 cents each, the total value of the $25 box of pennies was $35.45. That's a 41% profit. But counting my time I only made about $5 an hour. Still, these pennies can continue to go up in value. If they go up to 5 cents each my profit would be 121% at about $15 an hour. And if they go up to 10 cents each... well, you do the math. But I still won't be able to retire!

Electronova · Apr 14, 2010

mts said:
I had a nice box of pennies today. It took me about an hour and a half to separate them all and then tabulate the results. They were 29.76% copper which is much higher than the 25% that I typically get. There were 13 wheats and 6 Canadian coppers.

So with today's copper price and assuming wheat cents are worth about 4 cents each, the total value of the $25 box of pennies was $35.45. That's a 41% profit. But counting my time I only made about $5 an hour. Still, these pennies can continue to go up in value. If they go up to 5 cents each my profit would be 121% at about $15 an hour. And if they go up to 10 cents each... well, you do the math. But I still won't be able to retire!

It's easy to say that you have that much profit, but try to actually sell for those prices...

mts · Apr 14, 2010

Electronova said:
mts said:

I had a nice box of pennies today. It took me about an hour and a half to separate them all and then tabulate the results. They were 29.76% copper which is much higher than the 25% that I typically get. There were 13 wheats and 6 Canadian coppers.

So with today's copper price and assuming wheat cents are worth about 4 cents each, the total value of the $25 box of pennies was $35.45. That's a 41% profit. But counting my time I only made about $5 an hour. Still, these pennies can continue to go up in value. If they go up to 5 cents each my profit would be 121% at about $15 an hour. And if they go up to 10 cents each... well, you do the math. But I still won't be able to retire!

Click to expand...

It's easy to say that you have that much profit, but try to actually sell for those prices...

Agreed.

quiksilver · Apr 15, 2010

As a hobby i go thru pennies while watchin tv. I seperate the wheaties and store the copper ones in kitty litter pails until the day it is worth selling them.

CHAINCHOMP · Apr 23, 2010

I SAVE ALL OF THE COPPER, BUT I DON'T HAVE TOO MUCH.

($75.00 WORTH)

quiksilver · Apr 23, 2010

I sort copper pennies while watching tv. Not that it really matters but since i dump halves at a number of machines , i mix a lot of the pennies with them so it is not so obvious that i am dumping halves. This way i have a less of a chance of wearing out my welcome. Of course from the hobby standpoint getting wheaties is kool and Indian heads is great. My "dream" woulld be getting a flying eagle.

Electronova · Apr 23, 2010

I have a coin sorting machine that I rigged up, it puts the copper ones in one jar and it rejects all the rest. This is all done while I watch hockey games in which my team isn't playing. Once I feed them all through, I can then easily pick the wheats out of the copper and if I don't have a busy schedule I will usually look for errors in the copper ones, and if I really have a lot of time I check for errors in the zinc ones as well. It's pretty fun sorting them with the sorter, if you have an extra $50 I recommend getting the coin sorting part on eBay and then making a system in which the coins are shot into jars or something simiar.

This "machine" also can sort other coins, but I don't have it set up for that.