If you do the math on how many rolls of pennies you’d have to sort through to pay for one of the machines, you better start adding in the cost of railroad spur to the side of your house!
But it’s a hobby, like those who use metal detectors to find stuff.
My greater concern is what I’d do with the pile of newer pennies, since I’m not sure who will happily accept an unrolled bulk pile.
The bank will take the rolled pennies back as long as you don’t try to unload a pallet load at a time. But there is effort involved in re-rolling them, of course. The bank will also give you a dozen or 20 flat, empty wrappers for the asking.
If you look thru goodly numbers of pennies, you’ll become able to identify the pre-1982’s on sight. Not all of them, but most of them. On average, they are *generally* darker, of course, but not necessaraily so. They tend to be slightly thicker. I’ve found loads and loads of very shiny 1970’s pennies and, even more 1980 and 1981’s. Once (within the last 2 years) I went into a local B of A branch and got a box of $25 worth of pennies (when I was doing this) About 35 rolls of pennies within that box all had “Bank of America” with a purchase order number and a date something “7-22-82” on them, printed on the paper wrapper. All, every penny in those rolls was pre-1982. Those rolls must have sat untouched for nearly 30 years.
These older pennies are also struck better, more crisply.
The problem with this entire exercise is *verification* when you go to sell them. A buyer cannot easily verify that your submission is all composed of these earlier pennies without examining them at great effort.
A better exercise, IMO, is getting $1000 worth of half dollars from your bank. Last time I did this, I got exactly 1 90% HD, which was disappointing. The time before, and it was in 2010, I got 4 qty 90% HD’s and 9 qty clad ones. And a SBA dollar and one of those new manganese-type dollar coins.