xcopperstax
Silver Member
- Sep 3, 2018
- 2,508
- 4,872
- Detector(s) used
- Garrett AT Max
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
For some of you this will be old news. To me it was a great experiment. I felt like Mr. Wizard!
First off I should give credit to BuckleBoy for posting about this method of cleaning blackened silver. Thanks for the info it was extremely helpful. The instructions were very simple and easy to follow and it was fun to do.
As you will see in the pictures below I had a couple coins that I wanted to clean. The seated liberty dime was frustrating because it was black from salt water and pretty hard to see any detail. When I initially found it I rubbed the sand off it and left scratch marks across the face of the oxidized silver. The method in a nutshell: glass bowl, tin foil (shiny side up on bottom of bowl) and baking soda. Put the coin in or on top of the baking soda. Pour boiling water on it and let it fizz for 5 minutes. Run under cool water and rub lightly. I ran the coin through this process about 8 times with the seated side up. For some reason the chemical reaction only seemed to take place on the upside of the coin. I think you can tinker with this process without fear of destroying your coin. Pretty amazing difference seen here.
Next I had my recently found silver dollar. It was killing me that the tarnish / crud on it wouldn't come off. I don't have any interest or hopes of selling the thing but I didn't want to make it worse. For this one: I soaked it in the juice of one lemon for multiple 10 minute blocks of time (probably 40 min) then I'd take it out and rinse it off and rub with a q-tip lightly. It definitely made a different but it seemed like one treatment was effective and subsequent treatments didn't clean it any further. I had hit a wall. So I tried the above baking soda method. I gave it one treatment and rubbed it with a q-tip. The tarnish came off and I was stoked with the results. I know there is a school of thought that says coins should never be cleaned but these aren't that level. I would be very curious to know what would be done to a tree coin or something of that stature if you sent it for professional cleaning. Thanks for reading I would recommend anyone try this if you have a silver that you want to clean up.
First off I should give credit to BuckleBoy for posting about this method of cleaning blackened silver. Thanks for the info it was extremely helpful. The instructions were very simple and easy to follow and it was fun to do.
As you will see in the pictures below I had a couple coins that I wanted to clean. The seated liberty dime was frustrating because it was black from salt water and pretty hard to see any detail. When I initially found it I rubbed the sand off it and left scratch marks across the face of the oxidized silver. The method in a nutshell: glass bowl, tin foil (shiny side up on bottom of bowl) and baking soda. Put the coin in or on top of the baking soda. Pour boiling water on it and let it fizz for 5 minutes. Run under cool water and rub lightly. I ran the coin through this process about 8 times with the seated side up. For some reason the chemical reaction only seemed to take place on the upside of the coin. I think you can tinker with this process without fear of destroying your coin. Pretty amazing difference seen here.
Next I had my recently found silver dollar. It was killing me that the tarnish / crud on it wouldn't come off. I don't have any interest or hopes of selling the thing but I didn't want to make it worse. For this one: I soaked it in the juice of one lemon for multiple 10 minute blocks of time (probably 40 min) then I'd take it out and rinse it off and rub with a q-tip lightly. It definitely made a different but it seemed like one treatment was effective and subsequent treatments didn't clean it any further. I had hit a wall. So I tried the above baking soda method. I gave it one treatment and rubbed it with a q-tip. The tarnish came off and I was stoked with the results. I know there is a school of thought that says coins should never be cleaned but these aren't that level. I would be very curious to know what would be done to a tree coin or something of that stature if you sent it for professional cleaning. Thanks for reading I would recommend anyone try this if you have a silver that you want to clean up.
