It if you hurt yourself or cause a fire.) Your setup should be in SodiumĬarbonate or sodium bicarbonate solution is going to be the electrolyte ( WARNING: it is YOUR responsibility to do it right. What the object is, simply is not very appealing.Įlectrolysis made the dug Parrot shells look quite nice.Ī car battery charger as the power source. The as-found state was so ugly, I doubt even the most obsessive purist Of dug Parrott shells from the War Between the States (link to their A little while ago,Ī couple guys posted some before-and-after pictures Rusted to the point they are unrecognizable. Unless it's already of little value the way it is.Ĭleaning dug coins and relics is electrolysis. A few coin dealers are a little sketchy and might tell you to clean a valuable coin with Tarn-X
Money to pay a professional restorer to work on it, or else just leave it aloneĬompletely. If it is something really valuable it could be worth the Thing: If a coin is really dark or pitted BUT it's a rare date,ĭon't clean it yourself. Just watch you aren't ruining any Doubled Die coins or Read the date and the coin has a nice patina, leave it alone.Ĭlad coins are not likely to have collector value in the foreseeableįuture, so you can go ahead and scrub 'em till your heart isĬontent. Value, even if the coin "books" for only 25 cents. Sometimes dug coins have character that goes beyond
I'm not saying to turn your dug coin into a shiny disc, so whatĭoubt anyone would care if you overcleaned a common-date Wheat Cent. Lye will also attack most metals, though in anotherĪrticle perhaps we can explore the limited uses of lye solution for cleaningĬoins you dig up are either so badly corroded or are of suchĬommon date that they aren't worth much in the first place. You name it these are destructive treatments and should be disclosed ifįor some reason they've been used on a coin. Same thing with acids: vinegar, muriatic acid, An honest dealer will always disclose this Buffing, polishing, or abrading a coin cuts the Sufficient magnification, and an experienced collector will often be Have ruined a lot of good coins by taking metal polish, buffing wheels, Should do to a good coin is soaking in distilled water or maybe an You should probably not clean any coin that'sĮven somewhat collectible, except in special circumstances. Up coins brings us to an important debate that still rages on the Of course, I found later on that it sure didn't hurt to have a newer machine! Was there I began to suspect that operator skill had been the Simply wasn't looking in the right places. Latter find, made with a White's Eagle II SL, suggested to me that I You ever played jacks? This one wasn't much good for that.Ĭrumbled into dirty red flakes in the box where I stored it. It lay buried almost a foot deep at an old house site. It was rusted to pieces and all by itself, missing the rest Though: the toy kind that you pick up when you bounce aīall. Patience when I didn't find the 2,000 silver coins I saw in the brochures. To sites that had been pounded thoroughly by other detectors, and (2) my lack of
Great stuff was probably due to (1) my going The fact that I hadn't found a whole lot of I was pretty psyched about that find, though. As of the time this article was first put up on the web, I'd ever found maybe 5 silverĬoins (junk silver, common dates), a couple Buffalo Nickels, and aīadly corroded 1858 Flying Eagle Cent where you could barely, and I mean barely, read the date after Well, in my first few years of detecting, IĬoins and a lot of junk. He somehow luckily guessed was 100 years older than everyone thought Sovereign his first time out, under some kid's swing set in a park that Or you'd see the photo of some guy who found a gold In front of them where they'd spread out like 2,000 silverĬoins. I've done a little metal detecting, at least when I'm not searchingĪgo, the detector brochures used to show people with a blanket laid out
Into gold prospecting, metal detecting, relic hunting, and other Stuff! A mineral collector, for example, can easily cross over This is especially so for people who already collect Something about finding things that has an almost universalĪppeal. this little sub-section may expand if time is mainly about (what else?) mineral collecting,īut it seemed fitting to put some metal detecting stuff up here as Metal Detecting - Should You Clean Coins? - Cleaning Coins by Electrolysis