A couple from this past weekend.

[Whitetail]

Need to clean the 1898 indian. All I did was soak them in olive oil. Any and all ideas accepted!
Sorry about the zoom on the 1876 German coin I found. I had to crop it to get it below the 420KB.

 

[skateteacher]

Very nicely done! What did that German coin ring as?

 

[Aarong81]

You had an awesome weekend, Congrats! That V-nickel was in really good shape when it was dropped, they just don't hold up well in the ground. I have never heard of a way to improve the nickels much as far as cleaning goes. The two indians will be great coins to try out a new cleaning method. I soak mine in olive oil for a day or so depending on how crusty they are and then add a pinch of baking soda onto the oily coin and lightly circle the mixture around the coin to loosen the dirt/crust. Don't rub, just circle with light pressure using your finger. If the dirt doesn't come off try again after another day of soaking in olive oil. The soda doesn't disolve in the oil, thats the reason I use it because it retains a tiny grit(its powder after all). You can adjust how powdery or oily you want the mix by adding more of one or the other in your palm.

Get a few suggestions before deciding how to clean your indians. Less is somtimes best. and take a few 'in progress' pics for future reference so you can decide if you would repeat the same process again or not. Plus you will be able to tell if you are causing any damage while cleaning it. Its hard to decide if a pit in the green layer was there all along or was caused by cleaning, ect.

 

[Nancy-IL]

Fantastic finds. I love seeing those Indians and older nickels. Great silver there also. Excellent! Thanks for sharing and HH, Nancy

 

[Whitetail]

Thanks. I believe the German coin was about a 79 as it was surprisingly shallow. I have a couple other coins I found as well, but the pictures came out very blurry so I didn't post them. I'll try to retake the pic's.

Aaron thanks for the advice. My biggest fear is to find a nice coin and then ruin it by cleaning. Have any of you ever tried electrolysis? I tried it on some wheatback pennies with some very good results. I'm just worried about cleaning a coin too much. That 1898 indian might be a good candidate for electrolysis to clean it.

 

[Aarong81]

I very shortly played around with electrolysis on a couple pennies and they came out really dark. I never did it enough to learn how anyone else was getting good results. Although, its possible I was placing the pennies on the wrong polarity such as in place of the anode vs the cathode. I'm positive it would make a big difference as one draws metal onto the surface and the other breaks the surface down to be drawn onto the other. You would affectively be copper plating whatever your using as the cathode as shown in the pic below. The anode would be the penny, fittingly shown as a piece of copper. This also diminstrates the fact that the penny is eaten down while the elctrolysis is happening. It would also be very important how you attached your penny to any type of wiring, the immediate contact point seems to deteriate or break down faster than the rest of the penny. If you try this method, document your steps and what you use for electrolyte, ect. Each part can have a big influence in the results. If your solution has too much electrolyte it will draw more current and have a harsher affect and work much faster. I think you want to go with a very low current draw and go slow. this can be fine tuned by starting with the anode and cathode far apart in the electrolyte and slowly moving them closer to achieve the desired current draw.
Thats about all I can add to the discussion considering I havn't experimented much with the process. The pic looks much better once you click it, the black background will change to white once clicked.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Copper_electroplating.svg/471px-Copper_electroplating.svg.png

 

[Nancy-IL]

When coins are that far gone as the Indian cent, it's not going to do any more damage to if you take a brass brush to it. Sometimes it will take the crude off and sometimes not. I would never clean any silver coins with anything else but soap and water. NO brushes and never rub them when they're dry for that will even scratch them. JMHO, Nancy

 

[dseegy]

Nice you are sure hitting some good ones

 

[Whitetail]

Thanks. This was from one location at a friends home. I was lucky. I guess no one had ever hunted here before. I have gone back and have found some other cool stuff. Will try to post some pic's.