Junk Silver and a Junk Silver Question

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DoChenRollingBearing

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Engaging again in my new cheap hobby, I bought $10 (face value) of "junk silver" today while near my LCS.

They let me pick through their pails of quarters and dimes, I took three Barber dimes, two Barber quarters and six Standing Liberty quarters.

The rest of the pieces were shiny 1960s silver coins, with essentially all of their silver.

***

I wonder if any of you guys think it is "worth it" to pick through the pails for interesting pieces, or ANYTHING still left in them would be worth just "junk silver" value?

Thanks!
 
I still find stuff in bank rolls, so I know its out there. But I would think the stuff in "junk silver" pails is pretty well picked through; likewise the 'unsearched (by me) " rolls of wheat pennies that coin dealers are always selling or the "government sealed" CC silver dollars that "may win you a fortune". I'm a dork but I know how to steam open an envelope....
 
I doubt that it is worth picking through junk silver, especially at a dealer. Any dealer that has not already picked through it before putting it up for sale is not much of a dealer in my opinion.
 
I liked to pick through them for 2 reasons, to get the older coins that in a SHTF scenario, some people might initially at least not believe that an FDR dime that looks just like non silver FDR dimes actually have silver. Thanks to commercials if no other reason people have heard about mercury dimes, and morgan silver dollars and walking liberty coins etc. So I think those will have a more immediate recognition of their worth, IMO at least. Then if there are none of the older style coins left, I go for the best looking most whole coins, kind of like the OP stated, they will have the least amount of silver worn away from them. I pretty much gave up on my LCS for now at least. His premium on junk silver is as high or higher than his already over priced premium on bullion.
 
I doubt you are going to find anything of numismatic interest. I would pick the coins in the best condition (and therefore most likely to have the full original silver content).

11C1P said:
... in a SHTF scenario, some people might initially at least not believe that an FDR dime that looks just like non silver FDR dimes actually have silver. ...
Click to expand...

It's actually very easy to demonstrate. Just look at the edge of the coin. 90% silver coins will be solid silver colored. Later coins have a two-tone edge with a copper color.
 
I have been there and done that as well. I do it mostly for the fun of it, but very, very occasionally I do find something nice.
 

People that are aware know that, a lot of the clueless people who do nothing to learn about PM's or their monetary system aren't going to be convinced when you show them the sandwich coin vs a silver coin. Even now when you try to explain it to people they don't believe you. My son is always telling me how kids in his school think he's full of crap when he talks about the older silver coins, I have in the past had friends/co-workers (usually younger) that either say you,re full of crap or just nod politely and you can tell they think you are just crazy.
 

unfortunately, that is an excellent summation of the reaction I get to ANYTHING regarding current events I try to talk to people about. If it isn't about American Idol, their smart phone or their fork they just don't care.
 

Easy way to shut them up is tell them that you will PAY THEM ONE DOLLAR for EVERY silver dime they can find. Usually when they see you put your money where your mouth is, they will shut up.
 
mmerlinn said:
Easy way to shut them up is tell them that you will PAY THEM ONE DOLLAR for EVERY silver dime they can find. Usually when they see you put your money where your mouth is, they will shut up.
Click to expand...

That really won't accomplish anything. They could just come back with, and I'll pay you $100 for every unicorn you catch. Besides most of these people I I never see since I no longer have to work outside the house.
 
11C1P said:
That really won't accomplish anything. They could just come back with, and I'll pay you $100 for every unicorn you catch. Besides most of these people I I never see since I no longer have to work outside the house.
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From time to time the people in the grocery store I work for approach me and ask me if I'll pay twice face value for whatever they have found in their till. They think they have gotten a steal. We had an old lady come in one day with two rolls of mercury dimes and want to know if we still took them. I got two sacks of silver Washington quarters from bookkeeping at face because they "sounded" different. But yeah, the general public I see doesn't care anything about pre-65 silver and most folks don't even know what a silver American eagle is.
 
If there was ever any question as to my "mental stability" it's been settled two or three years ago when they tried to get me to sign the paper-work for my kid to get the bird flu shot. :rotflmbo:
 
There is a reason that people have given life to such thoughts as:

""People will not look forward to prosperity who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense

There is, I think, a level of hubris inherent in the human condition that supports an arrogant world view - that we are always smarter and better than those who came before us. That we can manage where our ancestors failed (even if we don't understand any of that history). Maybe it's a misplaced trust in our dear leaders. In any event, it seems that a recognition of the problems inherent in the current world order and monetary system is left to the vangard thinkers and those who see beyond the box.
 

It's weird cause to me society as a whole now is much less knowledgeable than they were even just a couple generations ago. The knowledge that makes our great technology to run is so compartmentalized that few people if any really know how to keep things running. One person understands programming a computer, another how wiring works, etc. Then another person understands his little piece of the puzzle, and maybe has a general knowledge of some of the others but if there was something like another flu pandemic lets say, it could be quite easy for their not be enough speciailists in a given field for certain technologies to keep running. Years ago most people were fairly self sufficient, today that number is very few. This might be one of the reasons why most of the stuff I watch on TV is history, science and shows about people doing the most with the least. I always have the utmost respect for people that can get by with seemingly nothing, while those in the media and many in the big metropolitan areas laugh at these people and mock their lifestyle. I think I better go put on "a country boy can survive" or "copperhead road" now. :wave:
 
yeah we discussed specialists vs generalists here a while back.

Its part of what Chris Martenson identifies as brittleness.
Others have referred to it as the fingers of instability as it all works brilliantly until it doesnt, then theres no one can get to grips with a failed system cos it involves too many specialists able to agree with what went wrong and how to get the system back up.
Its one of the reasons we hang out here (-:
 

It's kind of like a having an $80k Mercedes. Beautiful, runs great, relaible, then a $2 part that had a slight flaw goes kaput early and it's useless. Right now there are usually enough spare parts and people that can fix it, probably even under warranty. I kind of see our whole infrastructure and society in general as an engine like that. They were showing the attacks on those power grid in CA on the news, and that's like an attack on the spark plug wires of our engine. What happens when these attacks become more frequent and effective, pretty soon we might not have enough of the spare parts and people to fix them in place and we are broke down, and the longer we are broke down, the more things start to rot, then people start stripping us for parts. Next thing you know the us is sitting on blocks on the side of the road. Then the question is are we a classic car worth rescuing and re-building or are we just some random automobile not worth putting the time and effort into?
 
none of the options work if the fuel lorries stop


What kind of power grid attacks occurred and who was behind them ?
 

I bought some land in the Philippines. Down the road, at the top of a mountain, the Australians came in and built a nice subdivision, with water wells and pumps (the only way to get water that high). As soon as they left, the pumps were stripped of parts and now no water. I see (and my wife has said for ten years) that soon we will be the Philippines, economically and otherwise. No middle class and everything you own belongs to the government, at gunpoint.

the Philippines have more restrictive gun control laws and a higher homicide rate than we do, and EVERYONE I know has a gun. I can see that happening here very easily. Bing commented one day in response to yet another stupid-assed law they passed here, well, I guess we'll do just like we do at home. i said, hows that, and she replied "ignore the law". When we moved to Burnet 20 years ago, they refused to give her a drivers license because the lady who issued licensees here would not issue a license to a minority. Bing took the driving test twice (she got 100 on the written) and Margarette failed her both times, (you didn't turn your head ninety degrees at every intersection the first time, the second time she didn't give a reason, just scratched through the test "fail" and told me not to argue with her. She had taken driving lessons and was an excellent driver (for a beginner). I was going to go to the next county over, but she said screw them, everybody in Texas is crazy, and she drove without a license for ten years. After ten years, I got t-boned in a nissan by an SUV (I was lucky, I walked away, the other driver ran a stop sign doing 70, totaled both cars and broke her sternum and ankle) but I was bruised up and hurt like hell. I had a fit and told Bing if that had been you they would have taken you to jail, and the next day she went to the next county over and got her license. In the meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, someone in town took up a petition and had the lady removed.
They tried the same crap with me; the county clerk told me we don't do passport applications here, but I was fed up and got INS, the Postmaster General, myself and the county clerk on a conference call and settled that bullshit. The older I get the less tolerance I have for these assholes.
 
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mmerlinn said:
Shutting down the power grid is even more effective. If the pumps for the pipelines quit working, there is no fuel no matter how many delivery vehicles that you have available.
Click to expand...

Yeah, even if your gas station just got a delivery, you can't run the pumps without juice. I am sure given enough time someone would drag some sort of manual pump to get out gas, but most of those aren't going to be long enough to get anywhere near deep enough down to get all or even most of the gas. They could jerry rig some sort of extensions, but you probably would still end up leaving a lot in there.
 
11C1P said:
Yeah, even if your gas station just got a delivery, you can't run the pumps without juice.
Click to expand...

The gas stations cannot even get delivery from the refinery if the pipeline pumps don't have juice. Trucking gas from the refinery hundreds of miles to the gas stations is generally way too expensive.
 
mmerlinn said:
The gas stations cannot even get delivery from the refinery if the pipeline pumps don't have juice. Trucking gas from the refinery hundreds of miles to the gas stations is generally way too expensive.
Click to expand...

So what does that have to do with a gas station getting a delivery just before the power goes out? Do the fuel companies or the truckers know in advance of a power outage and stop deliveries? This is very interesting if this is going on. I have never noticed that around here, but then I've never looked for it.
 

You are totally missing the point. The vast majority of fuel moves by pipeline from the refineries to the distribution points. Gas here comes from a refinery some 250 miles away. If power supplies are disrupted as noted earlier in this thread, fuel deliveries to the distribution points are disrupted because the pipeline pumps have no power.

Based on the tank farms in this area, I doubt that there is more than a single day supply available at any time. Disrupt the power and in one day there will be no more deliveries to the local gas stations. And it matters not whether there are vehicles ready and willing to make the deliveries.

There are not enough vehicles available to deliver fuel 250 miles via highway, so disruption of the power supply in effect totally shuts down fuel availability here in a few days at most. Not just at a few gas stations, but at all gas stations regardless whether there is local power availability or not.

Years ago, when I was younger, most fuel in this area was delivered via railroad tank cars to small distribution points along the way. At that time there were tank farms even in small towns around here. I can remember 3 tank farms in the town I grew up in (20,000 pop), Shell, Flying A, and Texaco, all on railroad spurs. Now there are none. I think there were others, but I don't remember them.

Now all deliveries are semi-trucked in 50 miles from the regional distribution point. Once fuel began being delivered by pipeline, tank farms even in the regional center disappeared. Right now I can only think of one tank farm left in the regional center, and its size dictates that fuel is delivered "just-in-time" to an area that has doubled in population since I was a kid. Disrupt that just-in-time model, and within days vehicles won't move.

Do a search about refineries in the U.S. You will find vast swaths of the country with no convenient refinery should something go amiss. And if the enviro-idiots and the EPA get their way, there will not be ANY refineries in the U.S.

BTW, I am not against protecting and preserving the environment - I am all for it and do what I can towards that end. But, I am against enviro-idiots who will cut off their nose to spite their face and expect me to do the same idiotic thing.
 
hah.
The irony of sorting a generator to run your fuel station but you have no fuel for the genny

Bit like having a slow puncture on my 90CFM compressor and cant move it till the tyre is pumped up ....

And yes mmerlin, you describe the brittleness that justintime resource management brings.

What we do not know is what is planned for various outage possibilities.
There are gov groups who ponder and discuss these things but we are not party to their thinking so all we can do is speculate what might happen in the event of a major resource failure.

What we generally see is a fuel and food grab then people making the best of things and helping each other out while things get sorted.

As long as problems are localised they can be dealt with by resources being brought in.
 
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11C1P said:
Most of the options in a car will work even out of gas, till the battery goes dead.
Click to expand...
the only option that would interest me would be the turning of the wheels. A car battery is only designed to start the engine, it is not going to do much more than allow you to listen to the radio for a few hours, which to be fair could be vital.
 

No, you were missing my point. Even if the fuel had been delivered to a gas station only a few blocks from your house just seconds before the power blinked out, it would still unobtainable, never mind a fuel plant hundreds of miles away, or a even less than a dozen miles away in my case. Lets just say the refineries far away and trucks were still going but within a 100 mile radius of your house there was no juice. You wouldn't be able to get that gas that's only a couple blocks away, you'd have to drive 100 miles to get it!
 
rblong2us said:
the only option that would interest me would be the turning of the wheels. A car battery is only designed to start the engine, it is not going to do much more than allow you to listen to the radio for a few hours, which to be fair could be vital.
Click to expand...


You're the one that brought up the options in a car not working in the car, not me. You must no know much about car batteries, I've seen them power nothing but a radio for many many hours without going dead. I've also sat in them for a couple hours when out of gas running the radio, moving electric seats back and forth, turning on interior lights etc. They are capable of doing a lot more than running noting but the radio for a little bit.
 
You are quite correct 11CIP, a car battery will allow more than a radio to function.

I do not claim to be an expert and as you point out, a good condition car battery can keep a few things running for a good while but fundamentally car batteries are designed to give a high discharge for a short period. Leisure batteries are designed to give a low output for a long period but cannot crank a car starter motor properly.
Both types can be abused but will quickly show signs of failure.

All I was trying to say was that for a car to be any use ( beyond acting as a shelter ) for its systems to function for longer than a relatively short time, it must run its engine.
 
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