I found a two-headed nickel once. Also a nickel that sounded different when dropped. Almost plastic sounding.
Just don’t take any wooden ones
The point about the wear on coins is interesting. I assumed that wear was proportional to age. But it really might be that coins from recent decades don’t wear as much since they are used far less. Hmmm.
I still run into steel pennies once in a while. Those are easy to spot.
Buffalo nickels pop up but the problem is the date is always worn off. Wish I knew exactly how hold they were.
Silver coins just don’t come my way.
For some reason I collected Canadian coins when I was young. So several 50s and earlier of those. But nothing unusual about any of them, I suppose. I miss “D:G: REX ET IND:IMP”.
I once had a bunch of penny “blanks” - unstamped copper discs. IIRC they came in a roll from a bank. Long ago lost.
When i was a GM for Panera Bread I would get change from the bank next door. One day I was loading a drawer, it had no quarters so I opened a roll. It was a hand rolled paper roll not the newfangled plastic wrapped roll. As soon as I heard the coins hit I knew I struck pay dirt. Every coin was a pre 1965 silver quarter. I suspect the bank had bought them from someone that cashed in someone else’s coins…I immediately scooped up the quarters and bought the roll.
I was real good at being able to hear silver coins, they have a very distinct “ting”.
All this talk of coins, and not one word about copper vs. zinc pennies? There was a time when I separated pennies into three groups - pre-1982, 1982 (as there are both copper and zinc pennies from that year), and post-1982.
I have a few Susan Bs, a Bicentennial half dollar, a mis-died 1968 penny, a 1954 dime, and a 1945 quarter. A newer quarter that appears to have been used as a BB target should be around somewhere as well.
Bunged into my ‘keepsake’ box I have a teeny-tiny gold coin I found while clearing out my grandfather’s house. It’s badly worn, but I can make out what looks like a woman’s head wearing a crown made of plumes/feathers. I sometimes wonder if it is worth anything (I mean, more than the fact that it is made from gold) but it’s too worn to read the date or any other printing it might have had, so probably not.
I just keep it as a ‘neat’ little thing to have. I imagine that someday whoever ends up clearing out our house when the latter of us dies is going to find it just as neat a thing to discover as I did.
How teeny tiny? They have some mexican pieces that were only plated in gold and are not very valuable. They are like little fish scales.
I was a bank teller when silver went through the roof, and we were allowed to separate out silver coins and buy them from our cash trays with a supervisor’s oversight. I made probably $2-300 in the few months between the start of the mania and the decline as people figured out it was worth taking their own coins in for the premium. (That was about a week’s paycheck for me, no small t’ing.)
After that, we occasionally got whole rolls or rolled sets of silver, obviously pilfered from Dad or Grampa or whatever and cashed in by idiot children. We scored those, too.
Well, I don’t want to go dig it out right now (the box is near the bottom of a humpback truck stuffed with various stuff) but the diameter is just a bit smaller than the length of the last joint of my pinky finger. <grabs a ruler> Maybe 3/4 inch?
And it’s heavy for its size, so I don’t think it can be plated tin or anything like that.
I recently found a couple of silver quarters and three silver dimes by noticing that my changes sounded weird in my pocket.
Maybe a US gold dollar? I’ve got the 1855 version.
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Gunsmoke dropped the ball on their sound effects one time on the radio show. Chester had somehow procured “a whole dollar” and was going to buy Miss Kitty a beer. He tossed it on the bar, and there was this lame plastic clack sound. Everybody knows a silver dollar has a really nice ring, it is very distinctive.
My Name is Chester
I work for Matt Dillon
I make 2 dollars a day
I go see Miss Kitty
I play with her titty
She takes my 2 dollars away
That picture sure looks like my memory of it! I’ll have to get it out and compare when I’ve got more time/energy.
As I said, mine is in nowhere near that kind of condition, I hadn’t even been able to tell the date was on the back side. Maybe now I can make it out.
Anyway, in 1854 a dollar was an awful lot more money than it is now, and they carried it around as a coin a bit smaller than a dime??? I’d be afraid I’d lose them left and right. 
This is a freak triple-struck penny that I currently have on sale on eBay. I’ve had a few of these, including a nickel that was so off-center that the only thing showing was the date.
panache45, how would something like that ever make it into the hands of a private collector? I would have thought that however the Mint shipped them out to banks (in rolls?), a coin that misshapen wouldn’t be able to fit into the process.
My coin shop used to buy things like that one by the boatload. My source worked ion the counting room of the main bank in town. this bank was the distributor of rolls of coins to every bank in two cities, Akron and Canton. Cents were shipped in $50 face value bags from the Mint. The poured them into a counting machine and rolled the coins for distribution. Such and error stuck in the machine. They removed it and my source was allowed to purchase the coin at face value. He would visit every three months and sell me 50-100 random error coins, 90% of which were cents. Most were not as spectacular as the one shown.
Just to give you all an update, I actually did get a 1955 penny yesterday, from 7-11. I don’t think it is a double-die though. I have to look at it more carefully, though.
It does illustrate the point, though, that they are apparently still in circulation.
I’ve received tons of 1955 pennies during my retail career, and probably have a few at home, and not one has been a double die.