All different types of collections have their own in-the-know words or buzz phrases and to many that are not apart of that community don’t understand or can even be a bit confused when they hear them. Our fun little hobby of elongated coin collecting is no different. We often use terms like sinkers, copper, BU, circulated and quite a few others that we have reviewed in the past. Now today it’s time to add another one to our repertoire and that is Speed Rolling.

Speed Rolling is basically kind of a hack or a way to load up the machine with multiple coins at the beginning and then you can just continue to turn the handle and “speed roll” and entire set without stopping to reload the machine like you normally would.

Even if you have only used a penny press a few times your pretty much know the process here. Turn the handle to select the design you want, insert your coins and or dollar bill (if newer machine), and then start pressing. Once that coin is done and drops out, you just start the process all over again. Now if you are only pressing one set of coins, Speed Rolling may not really save you much time but we’ll put that to the test shortly.

First I should also mention that not all machines will allow for speed rolling and may just jam up.

The electronic machines are all automated so there is no way to do this with those style machines, and honestly they are already kind of speed rolling for you.

Most collectors I’ve spoken with have said that the common style of machine that will allow for speed rolling are these pennycollector (CTM) style machines. Which I’ll admit are probably the most common I’ve come across on my travels throughout the United States and should look very familiar to most collectors.

Recently I visited one of these machines over in Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando Florida. I timed myself pressing a set using the standard method where I inserted payment for one coin, pressed the penny, and continued one by one for the entire set of four designs.

For Speed Rolling here is what you need to do. Turned the handle to select any design on machine, then insert your first payment, you have to wait a few seconds until you can hear the penny has dropped into place, then be sure NOT to move the handle to another design. Leave it on that first design, and instead insert your second payment, wait for that penny to drop in place and repeat two more times. This way in theory you should have 4 pennies all lined up inside the machine ready to be pressed. Then once you start turning the handle do not stop, just keep rolling and each penny should just fall in place to be pressed after the one before it until the entire set has completed.

Above is a comparison of the two sets I pressed. The one on the left was using the Standard Rolling Method, and on the right we Speed Rolled which saved us about 13 seconds. As you can see Speed Rolling certainly is faster to press a set, but as I mentioned earlier if you are only pressing one set I don’t feel that this method would save you a whole lot of time and 13 seconds may not make a difference to you. Plus I have heard from collectors that speed rolling does increase the likelihood of getting a mis-rolled design due to the pennies not dropping down into the dies correctly. Obviously there are some pluses and minuses to this method.

On a quick little side tangent, if you have used one of the newer 4-design machines that have been converted in recent years and are pre-loaded with pennies and can be paid with a card or digital payment. These machines are setup to bill you the full four design amount when using a card, and once payment is made you can hear the machine drop four coins from the hopper inside. You then just start turning the handle and as stated in Step 2 of the picture above just Keep Cranking until all 4 coins are pressed. Basically you’ve already been speed rolling and didn’t even realize it.

For my own collecting since I usually only press one set and I do prefer to avoid mis-rolls whenever possible, I’ll probably just stick with the standard method. But I did really enjoy testing this out and I can see for certain situations where speed rolling would be a benefit to collectors. Let me know down in the comments below, have you ever tried speed rolling on your own adventures or is this something completely new that you may want to test out. I know that this topic may be a bit hard to understand through the above photos and my written descriptions, so if you would like to see speed rolling in action be sure to check out the video link below from our YouTube channel. Plus if you are stopping there be sure to Subscribe so you don’t miss out on plenty more pressed penny related videos.

Thanks for joining me again this week. Now get out there and press some pennies!!

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