I'm sure many of you know the trick for tracking how much silver you actually own with US junk silver. If not, the trick is for US 90% silver, add up the face value to $1.40 and that is roughly one troy ounce of silver.

So two half-dollars and four dimes are 1 troy oz, as well as one half, two quarters, and four dimes. Or just 14 dimes. It's a nice hack for quickly estimating how many troy ounces of silver you have.

But what of non-US junk silver with different percentages?

Instead of figuring out other hacks, I've made a table that can quickly tell me. You can see it here with some example data:

^{The four coins in the photo above are simply the ones I randomly choose for this example table}

This is very easy to set up, and I'm sure most of you can easily figure out the formulas to use, but just to specify, let's go thru it.

The weight column is in grams. I should have added a (g). To then get the silver contents in grams in column E, simply multiply the weight by the silver %. For example, for the second row, that's =D2*E2.

The top row of the "Total (g)" column is just copying over F2, but every other row adds the previous total to the silver in grams. For example, for cell G3, the formula is =G2+F3

Then to convert that all to troy ounces just divide the total (g) by 31.1034768.

That's all. Easy.

I use Numbers on a Mac so I'm not sure if it would do any of you any good for me to upload this file somewhere, but if anyone wants it I can do so. Just let me know.

I keep two of these tables side by side. One tracks all the junk silver I own. For this one I add in the purchase date and purchase price. The other table (the one photoed) I use if I want to add up different combinations for the purposes of talking about them, offering to sell them, or whatever.

Anyway, that is all. I am not nearly as good at tracking things as my making this spreadsheet might suggest, but I do make the effort. If you are serious about stacking or just collecting, you might also consider tracking what you have.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.