Coin counter

Never mind the change. Those metal coffee cans are valuable. They're all made out of mylar-ized cardboard now.

Some time ago, maybe late 90s, Radio Shack was selling a plastic version of the coin sorter pretty much like the ones I used to see in local banks in the 60s and before.

A 3# coffee can holds over $4,000 in Canadian $2 coins or over 2,000 coins. Ranfom-sample your stash, do some statistics. Nice problem: how does non-uniform coin size affect number of coins of each denomination present?

A lot. I have a one pound can full of pennies that I counted years ago, and I think it was something like $40. If my memory of how much is in there is right, then a three pound can of pennies would be $140. I imagine you could have $600-$900 per can depending on the distribution of coin denominations.

On Tue, 23 May 2017 19:08:15 -0400, Tom Gardner wrote: Any ideas who might have a machine and doesn't

Your local newsagent may have one, mine does, no charge, but I usually only have about $150 to consolidate.

Maybe you can hire the machine for a couple of days, probably much less than paying 5%.

HTH

Alan

Tom Gardner wrote in news:og2fco$d7l$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

At the end of each day, I toss my loose coins into a quart mason jar. When the jar fills up, I sort and wrap the coins and take them to the bank.

You'd be surprised at how quickly a quart of change can be sorted by hand -- less than half an hour -- just dump it out onto a table and have at it. I use a manual sorting tray that I bought years ago, the Rapco Mini Coin Handler, to count and arrange the coins for wrapping.

In my experience, the value of one quart of mixed U.S. coins is about $60. Guessing that a 3- pound coffee can holds about three quarts, 8 such cans = 24 quarts = about $1400.

Just dump the coins in and get your money. You didn't worry about the loss in storage for how long ? That is a nominal service charge.

Martin

Just for grins I looked at coin sorters on ebay, from cheapest with shipping on up, to see how bad bad could be :-). The under $20 ones had terrible reviews and looked it, but there were a couple at $31 with shipping that I thought might get your job done before wearing out. If you have $1500 in coins and spend $31 plus what, $20-40 in wrappers, that's 50 or

60/1500=3.3-4% (hey, your friend's 5% with wrappers isn't sounding too bad given the hours you will spend with these). Anyway, for your amusement look at (needs 2 C cells) and (manual crank).

Tom Gardner on Tue, 23 May 2017 19:08:15 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Harbor freight has a coin sorter for sale. Battery operated/.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although far too often, Age travels alone."

I'll have to grab one of those. Coin rolls are much easier to sling around than coffee cans, I'll bet. I'd also like to find an aluminum magnet which could separate the aluminum pennies from the solid coppers. ;)

Grants Pass has just been blessed in the last 2 weeks with a brand spankin' new Harbor Freight! Ground has been broken for the new In-n-Out Burger, too. And we're on track to getting a second fire for faster internet smoke signals. It's a big city now. Garsh!

The newer ones are copper-plated zinc, the change came around 1983, and those in the transition period can be sorted by weight.

Yeah, zinc, not AL. Steel and AL pennies were more rare.

So, I need a zinc magnet. Got one handy?

I'd just love to sort 20# worth of pennies by weight, wouldn't you? ;)

actually -- this is possible, except that the pennies are zinc inside the copper skin, not aluminum.

Set up a ramp with a groove that the pennies can roll down.

Just as they exit, run them through a voice-coil magnet assembly from an old (not too old, but non-functional) disk drive. Set this on the edge of a table, and first roll known copper pennies through it and note there they hit the floor. Then do the same with the zinc-copper pennies. They will land in a different area. The moving penny generated an indictively generated magnetic field in the pennies, which slows them down -- differently depending on the mass and the conductivity. Copper is a much better conductor than zinc is, so the copper pennies will be slowed down more. The higher the starting point of the ramp, the greater the speed, and the greater the difference in speed after they go through the magnet assembly.

Enjoy, DoN.

The HF one looks like the cheapest style on ebay, with terrible reviews including that they take a nonstandard slightly shorter wrapper so you have to buy theirs, so caveat emptor.

Larry Jaques on Thu, 25 May 2017

15:49:36 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

There are ways.

I just sort them as I get them.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although far too often, Age travels alone."

The transition window is only one year, 1982:

"Carl Ijames" on Fri, 26 May 2017

11:46:28 -0400 typed >> >[ ... ]

It is an option.

Other options include getting a grandkid over and playing a sorting game. Sort and stack, stack and sort.

Personally, dump them all in the coinstar machine. Yeah, it has a "steep cut", but "your done."

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although far too often, Age travels alone."

I'm curious: Why did you save all those coins if sorting and wrapping them is such a pain in the ass? I make sure I use my change as fast as I can. No sorting. No wrapping. No fees. Net income: nigher than if you pay to sort and wrap.

Why mess with cash at all? I rarely do, and the couple times a year there are more than a few coins in my pocket I just leave them on the nearest horizontal surface and they disappear in the same way that the empty toilet paper rolls regenerate.

Scanning this coin counting thread though makes me wonder if I'm missing out on the fun and exciting habit of using, hoarding, sorting and rolling coins. Has the job became more enjoyable since my paper boy days? :)

Data update complete, thanks.

That would be a whole 'nother kettle of fish, wouldn't it?

Interesting concept. Thanks.