Penny Press

I’ve always been a fan of the penny press. The penny is one of my favorite coins and I love that you can get a souvenir for just 50c. I prefer to use all copper pennies, since the post-1982 variety tends to have too many variations and the end result causes too much of the zinc middle to show through.

When I attended a Penguins hockey game last month, courtesy of a friend of mine, I spotted the press while waiting for him to come out of the gift shop. Of course I didn’t have any pennies with me at the time. When my coin buddy Suzy heard about it, she knew she just had to go and get a whole mess of them.

We scheduled a ‘date’ and met to find the press had a handy change machine where you could only get quarters. Suzy had to find pennies in the gift shop across the hall from the press.

There are four designs and I pressed three of each. After cleaning them off a little, I put them in my Penny Passport book. I’ll probably be getting several dozen more in the near future!

Spring coin show

On Sunday, March 18, my best coin buddy, Suzy, and I went to the C.A.M.P. coins show in Monroeville. It’s free to get in and you’re automatically registered in a drawing for a gold coin. There are drawings every hour for other prizes. It’s really well run and I find the people who have tables there to be especially nice and accommodating. Suzy and I emptied one bucket of foreign coins into another bucket and I found a couple of really nice coins.

Among them, this wonderful British commemorative 50p dated 1994. The subject is the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. I’ve always wanted one of these but could never find one. I managed to snag a Thai commemorative 1B coin, whose subject is the Sixth Asian Games.

Several tables had banknotes, which reminded me that I forgot to bring my stash that I wanted to sell. In the hopes that I could at least get an idea of how much my stash was worth, I began a conversation with one of the vendors. His eyes lit right up when I told him about the Iraqi Dinar notes that I wanted to sell. He gave me his card and asked me to email him with pictures. We discussed meeting at a coin show this Saturday, but I can’t get there. Apparently, these are of such high value that he wants to meet me and we can discuss a sale. I’m trying not to be excited, but it can’t be helped. He is also interested in buying the silver coins I had listed on eBay, so I might be able to get rid of my entire stash that is up for sale in really short order.

Copper mining

For the first copper mining project in 2012, I obtained another $25 box of pennies. All 2500 were sorted, separated, catalogued and the ones I didn’t want were wrapped back up again. Since I started this activity, I have sorted, by hand, 11,500 pennies. A small percentage, as expected, are wheaties- my favorite.

I’ve been keeping aside some nice looking copper and the shiner non-copper ones, as well as all 1982 specimens and all presentable pennies between the years 2008 and 2012. I did have a small gathering of 2007 pennies, but I haven’t been running across too many good looking examples lately, so it’s not a priority.

In the second-to-last roll in today’s mining project, I ran across a rare find, indeed. A 1907 Indian Head. I was stunned. This is the most exciting find I’ve made in circulation change since my silver quarter hoard when I worked at Revco in 1995.

I’ll be getting another $25 box in the next week or so to keep me busy while my wife goes to visit her mom for a couple weeks. Maybe I’ll get this lucky again!!