Dirty clad cashed in for some big silver.

[Ed (Upstate NY)]

Took my tumbler cleaned clad coins to the Coin Star machine and ended up with a little over $150.00 . Hit the monthly coin show in Albany today and invested it in some silver bullion coins. Ended up buying a 2013 and two 2012 US silver eagles and for something different, a 2013 silver Chinese Panda. Granddaughter likes Pandas so that one will go to her. In the past I would save up my clad finds and puchase gold coins but that was back when gold was about $400.00 an ounce. Just have to settle for silver now. Hopefully ground will thaw soon so I can get back out there digging for some "roundness" and "sweet nectar."

 

[dirt doctor]

Nice looking coins Ed and sure a great way to make finding clad a more rewarding experience . Plus you've got a chance of finding a silver coin in the coin return someone before you may have missed .

 

[bugg]

Especially when the big boys are saying silver will hit a few hundred $$$$ an oz in a few years!

 

[park pirate]

Nice coins ED, thats a good way spend your clad, havent cashed in my clad yet, must have at least 200. bucks. See ya in the spring....

 

[Critterhunter]

That's the right idea for clad, unless using it to buy another coil or something detector related. I too dump my clads into the Coin Star. I do wash them but don't tumble, because I saw a TV show about that company and turns out part of that 9 cent fee they charge per dollar is used to sort and clean/polish the clad. They then sort by whether it's in good enough shape to put my into circulation, or to end up trading the treasury for new coins.

So I figure if they are cleaning/polishing and sorting anyway for that 9.9 cents or whatever, I don't need to be using my tumbler on them. Way I figure then it's worth it to me not to have to tumble my clads by paying that fee.

Only thing I do do, besides washing them in a bucket of soapy water, is to sort out any coins that are so badly ate up they might jam the machine, which usually turns out to be some zincs. Most of that stuff will get spit back out the machine, and if it does jam the clerks will unfreeze it real quick, but just the same I don't like the embarrassment of them seeing the dirty looking clads I've been dumping into it, so I make sure to fish out any bad ones before hand these days and use those as spending change when I can.

My neighbor is always rolling her change from her husband and son, so for Christmas we got her a coin sorter that sticks them into rolls by type and automatically levels it off to the right coin amount for each role. Really sweet setup. I shopped around at the office supply stores and various chains, comparing best prices and features. Many of them lacked one thing or the other, such as many ran on batteries which I didn't like instead of plugging into the wall. Turns out Sprawlmart had the best one feature and price wise, and it'll even sort out dollar coins too. It handles handfuls at a time so it's fast and was only around $26 (the biggest model they had).

I like the darn thing so much after watching my neighbor use it as a handy time saver that I'm going to pick one up myself for my detected clads. That'll save me the 10 cent fee on using Coinstar. I'll just wash, let the machine sort them into rolls, and head up to the bank. You can either use standard pre-formed coin rolls meant for coin sorters that are cheap and found at most stores, or you can just dump the sorted plastic tube rolls into standard bank coin rolls which are free.