Junk Silver question

You can find some still but it is rare. Your best chance is half dollars. I look at all my pocket change, last year I found a 1964 dime. That's about it though. I keep meaning to ask my bank if they have rolls of half dollars to try it myself.

In the pharmacy I've had 2 people over the past year give me change with a jeffersonian nickel, and a kennedy half dollar(1967). I was thrilled. Doesn't happen often.

I spent some time going through rolls of half dollars and didn't have any luck.  My bank lets me withdrawl boxes of Kennedy halves worth $500.00 each.  If you do that, just remember you don't need to look at the dates, just look at the reeded edges.  If it's a clad coin, you'll see a copper like color.  If it's silver, the reeded edge will just be silver. 

Might not be worth your time, but you can find lots of pre 1983 pennies out there that contain 90% copper (worth about .03).  Or if you could take out $500.00 worth of nickels and you'd have $610.00 worth of copper. 

Why our some of our coins have reeded edges:

http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/?action=fun_facts10

I thought about this in 1977. A buddy and I changed maybe 100 rolls where I found 25 40%'s and 15 1964's/Franklins. He was lucky. He found an entire roll of 1964's once. It became amusing to each bank seeing us on multiple occasions trying to find ways to explain why we were doing this. We dumped sorted rolls to exchange for dollars at one bank, then drove to the same banks over and over again until the manager kicked us out. We wrote that bank off and headed for new ones. I also let my buddy do most of the driving since I was cheap in those days and didn't want to spend any money on gas.

I recently tried this again myself with $2000 worth of Halves. Found Ziltch. I had to put them all back into the rolls as there are no banks willing to accept bags for counters in my area. I also didn't want to give up the 8% to shove them down a CoinStar machine. 

The bottom line IMO is that they can sort these using weight differentiator machines before releasing them to the banks. My only suggestion would be to go to the smallest bank in your area in a very small town....Like really small----and ask for the halves that are sitting in their vault. It's possible those might still have not been sorted by others, but the chances are slim. As for quarters and dimes---forget it.

Now---Having said that, I recently got myself caught up in the idea from the survival blog that it might be a good idea to save your nickels

http://www.survivalblog.com/nickels.html

...so I bought $1000 from banks that had them in their vault. I didn't order them. Those come in $100 boxes and are too new. After sorting through $1000 worth of nickels, I found 7 war nickels. You can work out whether that's worth your time.

I'd like to point out that the only way you are going to have any luck with "coin roll hunting" is if your bank orders their coins from someplace other than an armored company (I'm looking at you, Brinks). Any armored company like Brinks, Loomis, Dunbar will have exactly 0% silver content in their coins. This is because they run all their coins through automatic detectors and take the silver out and sell it for a profit. 

If your bank rolls their own coins or gets them from the Fed you have a better chance because they will typically not be run through a detector.

Your best bet is probably a small local bank than rolls their own coins and has lots of small business (merchant) customers, because the flow is pretty good of coins coming in for deposit and being re-rolled by the bank. Extra points if the bank uses clear plastic wrappers :)

Now if you're really really lucky and you or your old grandma live in the sticks somewhere, your bank might have a box of old dusty silver Kennedy's in the back of the safe that got stashed there 48 years ago.

Anyway, the bottom line is that you should find out where your bank gets their rolled coin from before you have them order it, or you'll be wasting your time and their time.

Last winter I through bit over 2000$ in half Dollars for... NADA.

About the same for dimes, and found maybe 3 or 4.

There are a few silver coins I guess, but I didn't find it worth the effort.

my x wife did the books in a chain grocery store for years and checked all the coinage every night.  This was in a town of about 8,000.  she would go months with zip then every now and then would come home with a bag of pre '65 then zip for months.  someone had discovered a stash and spent it, other than that there was nothing and this was coinage coming from circulation not from brinks, and this was years ago.