Nickel Hunt

One thing you might not know about me - I'm a coin collector, and sometimes enjoy looking through pennies or nickels from the bank to search for ones to keep. Today, I'm going to be looking through a box of nickels to see if there are any old or valuable ones.

The box contains 50 rolls, and each roll contains 40 nickels. There are two things to look for on a nickel - the year, and the mintmark. The year just tells you the year it was minted, but the mintmark tells you where it was minted - D = Denver, S = San Francisco, no mintmark = Philadelphia. My goal here will be to look through the 2000 coins and see if any particularly valuable ones are inside. Anything from the 1950s or before, I'll be saving because they are worth a little bit over face value. Certain year and mintmark combinations are even more valuable - 1950-D is perhaps the rarest, worth 100x face value. That's not a ton of money given that face value is just 5 cents... but it's still really fun to look for them.

I'll probably find a handful of nickels from the 40s and 50s, but if I'm lucky, I'll find some that are even rarer. This includes the "Silver War Nickels" produced from 1942 - 1945. These were made with 35% silver because of the war, and are worth a couple bucks a piece. They still have Thomas Jefferson on the front. If I'm really lucky, I'll find the nickels they produced immediately before Jefferson Nickels - the Buffalo Nickel. These were made between 1913 and 1938. Even the most common dates are worth a buck or two, and rarer ones can be worth tens or even hundreds of dollars - not bad for a nickel. I don't expect to find any buffalo nickels in this box, but you never know. Even older than that are Liberty Head nickels, produced between 1883 and 1912. I've only found a couple of those ever.

I'm not expecting to find anything too extraordinary in here, but even getting a few old coins would be great. It will probably take between 2 and 3 hours to go through them all, maybe longer depending on how the stream goes. Wish me luck!

PS - I also have a penny box that I need to go through. Maybe next stream.