New to the hobby 0

[Awii031683]

I recently started collecting after seeing a few random videos about the silver market. I started out doing coin roll hunts and checking some of the change I had around the house. It has rapidly evolved into a minor obsession with all kinds of coins. Being a computer engineer and prior service member, I have been conditioned to absorb a lot of information for work. This new hobby has lead into learning a great deal in the last few months. So much to learn and I feel rather pathetic at times about how enjoyable a roll hunt can be for me. The wife is not to happy about me taking over the dining room table a few nights a week but my son's love it. I have not bought a membership yet, but I'm interested in doing it soon as I have a few coins I want to have graded. Any advice on whether to go with PCGS or NGC would be great. My interest are somewhat evenly split between the precious metal stacking and numismatic collecting. I see value in both. Definitely on the hunt for the West point Quarter but I am somewhat suspicious about the process of releasing the coins into circulation. Would love to see what the logistics or the strategy that is used in scattering the W coins into circulation with P and D mints. Recently I found almost an entire roll of War in the Pacific Quarters, about two weeks ago full of P and D war in the Pacific quarters but they have been sparse since. Lowell's are very abundant though, I have 4 of the die chip errors. I suspect many others do as well and would love to hear some opinions on what the real value of the Lowell errors are. I see such a wide spectrum of valuation on the web.

Edited August 8, 2019 by Awii031683

[Conder101]

Coin rool hunting is fine and can be lots of fun, especially if your boys enjoy it too.  Something they can do with Dad.  As for buying a membership with NGC or PCGS, if you are still just at the roll searching stage, DON'T.  Unless you happen to get VERY lucky and run into a known, popular, and rare variety, the chances of finding something rollsearching that would be worth the cost of submission would be very remote.  And if you do find something worth submitting THEN when be the time to consider a membership.  And frankly you would most likely want to wait until you had several pieces worthy of submission so you don't get killed on shipping and form fees. (five coins sending each in as you find it means $50 in form fees and $160 in return shipping.  Wait and send all five at once means $10 in form fees and about $34 in return shipping.  A savings of close to $170.)

As for how the W quarters were/are distributed, San Francisco is striking two million of each and shipping half to Denver and half to Philadelphia.  Most of the Lowell quarters had already been distributed when they decide to do the W quarters so they simply put a scoop of W quarters in the top or each Lowell balistic bag they still had on hand and then scoops into the bags of the next coin, I don't remember what it was.  I don't know if they have continued this method, scoopd in the top of the bags, or if they trickle them into the production stream after the coins are struck but before bagging.  The second method would be preferrable as that would get the coins distributed throughout the bags.  Just dumping some scoops in the top of the bag results in the first few boxes of rolls coming out of the bag being very heavy in W coins while the boxes from later in the bag having few or none.  If they are introduced into the production stream then they will be disbursed though out the bage and most every box will have a few.

Withthe Lowell coins they also announced what cities would be getting them.  No great surprise, if you looked at the list it was cities that had Federal Reserve banks or Federal Reserve branch banks.  That is how they distribute ALL their coins.  But it did mean those were the cities where they were most likely to show up first.

As for the Lowell die chip errors, General rule die chips are not worth beans.  I don't think there are any die chip errors that are really worth significant money.