Whew — spent the entire night from 5:50 PM last night all the way to breakfast time, on Ken’s project. I’ll explain:
Suppose you’ve got some “junk silver” coins, mostly of the walking Liberty Half variety, and some Morgan dollars and a few Peace dollars, but they’re worn down a LOT, so much so that you can buy and sell them at “melt” price, which is what the daily price is at the refineries.
Mind you, even the BU Bright Uncirculated coins of these types are butcherously low-priced on eBay.
If you sell the coins, you’ll get a pathetic percentage of what they’re supposedly worth, because the metals dealer has to make a profit, and refineries are tough to deal with.
Of course, you pay a premium for any precious metal when you buy, and you pay a penalty for any precious metal when you sell, which is why it’s truly impossible to make money by trading gold or silver — you get beaten down on the exchange and you have to pay all the refinery costs.
Bottom line, it ain’t worth it.
So here’s what happens: you buy a very worn down silver dollar for $6.00 a pop. You hold it for 35 years and go to sell it, and you’re shocked to hear that all it’s worth now is $8.08, which, after you calculate for 35 years of Republican-inspired inflation into the mix, means you lost about half your money, if you’re lucky and don’t get skinned alive by the precious metals dealer.
I just don’t buy and sell silver or gold — it ain’t my style, and it’s nowhere worth the hassle.
So what I recommended was that we convert the silver over to something other than “melt value” coins, and what came out was an upgrade of the collection which now included some Early American coins that we could mount in fancy silver bezels and sell for a lot more money.
This would compress the collection and also make it more saleable to a wider audience than just coin collectors.
Keep in mind that the junk silver is just exactly that. By the time you exchange it, any hope of profit should be gone from your mind.
You buy silver to counter inflation, and it doesn’t work. You buy it as a possible survival tool, and you have to figure in what it takes to trade anything in the Apocalyptic Times.
What are you gonna do, wander out there and hold up some food and offer it in trade? You’d better have good cover and a bit more firepower than you’re facing, and if you think you can use silver to barter with in the coming mayhem, you’re wrong.
It takes silver PLUS a good ranged weapon and a flak jacket and shield to even hope for a fair trade, and then, you run the risk of being tracked after the trade, hunted down and that’s the end of your trade.
It makes no sense to try to SELL junk silver, and you surely won’t get retail for it. We actually tried putting the junk silver up for sale at the shop, and of course, it went nowhere fast.
The only way to get money out of it is to trade it up first and sell the upgraded result, but that’s time-consuming and you need to go to lots of coin shows, which after covid, seems decades away, and not good for us old folks to mingle in the packed crowds of a gem and mineral show or a coin show or even a fair booth, which doesn’t work for coins, believe me.
We found out over a three year period that the fairs were not good for coins.
Now we’re finding out that the internet is not a whole lot better, either. The problem now is that everyone has the same coins for sale, and they’re busting their bottoms to undersell everyone, including you.
So don’t offer the same coins.
Art Sells at a Profit
Art sells at a profit, while junk metal has a fixed price, and it’s low, really low, and it tends to stay in a tight range for decades at a time.
Convert Your Silver Coins to Hobo Coins, Carved Coins, for fun & profit.
How about selling your coins once they’ve been altered into art objects?
What kind of art objects?
Well, art objects called “Hobo Coins”? You can take an ordinary coin and upgrade it with a hobo carving and sell it for hundreds of dollars, especially if the signature is worth something and the artist has a following, and I fit both description, so I offered to help out.
I offered to convert a couple of coins, but then did a few more and a few more and a few more .. it got so wild that we ended up with two engraving vises at $1200 apiece, plus tools — and a whole gravure setup that you couldn’t duplicate for any price today — we got it from a retired pro engraver.
Naturally, you can’t recarve a coin that has most of its details worn off or blurred, so we traded those for better coins with more detail on them, to make them more clear when carved, which reduced the size of the collection, but improved its sales potential.
So the collection is somewhat smaller now — better coins, but fewer coins — and all the silver coins are now carved into Hobo Coins and priced to sell as art objects, which has a great deal more promise than selling silver at melt value.
Some of the silver was converted to a huge pile of Early American Coronets for carving, but they haven’t all been carved yet, due to covid and the permanent closure of the gallery.
Anytime you want ideas on how to upcycle things like old coins, lemme know, and I’ll post something about it. Don’t sell in a shop — sell online.
I hope this little update gives you some good ideas on how to proceed. Remember that you can carve just about any coin, and all it really takes is a nail — that’s how hobos did it back in the 1930s Great Depression, and that’s how they do it now.
I have a large collection of hobo nickels, and they’re all authenticated and rare.
How did they manage? Well, they’d sometimes get an extra nickel more than they needed for their daily grub, and they would spend days or weeks carving that nickel with a sharp steel nail from the hardware store, and then they’d sell it for a dollar and sometimes more.
Sometimes more means up into the tens of thousands, in some cases. Hopefully mine will bring that kind of sum in the near future. There isn’t any far future.
That’s what gave me the idea of trading into Early American coronets and carving them into SIGNED hobo coins, and that’s what the entire collection features.
I may or may not be able to carve more coins, but at the moment, there is only this one collection of signed hobo coins, with the exception of the coins of my own — ancient coins, with kings on them — I carved to amuse myself.
So when is a copper coin worth more than a silver coin?
You’d be surprised.
Want to know more? Attend the next workshop.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby