How I Clean my Nickels - Excellent Results

[Clifford Powell]

Because I’m caching in all my clad I needed to clean them up before rolling them to take to the bank. I have several hundred nickels that were pretty bad. I tumbled some of them in water and dish soap which removed all the dirt just fine but 90% of them still had a really bad red stain. I tried everything I could think of the get rid of the stain with nothing working at all. Some of the ‘experiments’ even caused the top of the tumbler to blow off – funny actually. I tumbled some batches for 24 hours plus – stain still there. Then I read on this forum about salt and vinegar so I put a few of the stained coins in a small plastic bowl just to see what happened. AMAZING!! Thirty minutes later the stain was gone and the coins were silver colored again. Draw back was the coins didn’t have any luster at all to the point of looking very lightly sand blasted but still good enough for circulation.

So I put a handful in the tumbler with coarse gravel, vinegar and salt and tumbled. Excellent results. The coins even had a luster – guess that was because the gravel was polishing at the same time. Another plus is it only took 1 hour tumbling to do the trick. As I’m writing this I have some zincs and copper pennies in a bowl and it seems to work with them too even though it changes the color a bit but still good enough for the bank.

Now I’m not saying this will work for you as our soil here in New Mexico seems to cause the red stain. If you want to try this just put a few coins in a dish and try it out. I DO NOT suggest using this for collector coins at all!!

Does anyone know what goes on with the chemistry of this process? I haven’t a clue and would like to know.

HH

 

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[Hill City Rebel]

One observation - those nickels have about nine cents worth of metal in them at the present price of the metal. Might want to hang on to them rather than cashing them in. Good luck.