cleaning old coins question.

[Tajue17]

I should of took a picture but I dug up 5 old wheaties this weekend from an old house thatbwas abandoned for at least 30yrs. the coins where at least 4-5" down and not sure if its the soil conditions but I can abrely tell these are wheaties and you cannot see a date. one coin the edge is all eating away. on a side note I also found a quarter size coin with a square hole thru the center and it lookslike some kind of aisan writing on it,, my camera stinks and I cannot get a clear photo of this coin but I'll try again when I get home ..

anyway how do you guys clean coins you find.

 

[hatpin]

I have a lot of badly eaten wheat pennys. I dug them out of a flood plain and there were a lot of cinders in the soil. Your pennies are corroded. There is no good easy way to clean them that I know of. I tried letting them soak in cooking oil for a few days and then pick at the corrosion with a toothpick . Repeat and pick at them everyday. Its slow but I had a prettier penny afterwards.It wasnt worth the effort.

 

[Tajue17]

do you think if I'm digging up corroded wheaties in this area then I should expect pretty much anything old to be in the same condition? also thanks for the cooking oil tip too..

 

[hatpin]

No , silver will probably be in decent shape. If your finding wheats keep searching.

 

[hatpin]

I also did the same thing with water. It worked just as well.

 

[scubadetector]

The old coin you found with a square hole in the center is an old Chinerse cash coin. Very old BUT millions and millions were made and they are worthless but interesting in a collection.

If the ground is that bad and the pennies are ate away, probably nothing you can do to clean them to get the dates.

 

[Salida]

Throw them, the pennies, into a tumbler with venigar, leamon juice concentrate, and a hand full of salt.
You can also do this with clad as well. Both will clean up within an hour of tumbling. DO NOT add any liquid soap as it
will cause pressure inside the tumbler. You won't need it anyway. I throw corroded pennies away. I WILL NOT put
them in Coin Star for some other poor slob to deal with. Thats just not right. If it were MY Coin Star I would not want someone
pawning this junk off on me either. We're all trying to get by.
Salida

 

[scubadetector]

Throw them, the pennies, into a tumbler with venigar, leamon juice concentrate, and a hand full of salt.
You can also do this with clad as well. Both will clean up within an hour of tumbling. DO NOT add any liquid soap as it
will cause pressure inside the tumbler. You won't need it anyway. I throw corroded pennies away. I WILL NOT put
them in Coin Star for some other poor slob to deal with. Thats just not right. If it were MY Coin Star I would not want someone
pawning this junk off on me either. We're all trying to get by.
Salida

THIS is NOT the way to clean OLD coins. If there is any value in them whatsoever you now killed it. Look at the value of a 1914D penny or a 1909SVBD. New clad sure, not a problem.

 

[Dodqe]

But if it's so corroded that you can barely tell that it's a wheat you might as well tumble it. There's no way to tell if it's a super collectible or a run of the mill coin. It's like my colonial coins...Some of them have absolutely nothing on them but green corrosion. The only way I can tell what they are is by their size and the fact that they are copper. They will never be worth anything in that condition. So I clean them. I use electrolysis...

 

[scubadetector]

And my friend Greg found this coin in the water on Sunday. He used electrolysys also and WOW. It was gray black when I saw it in person. Salt and vinagar is the absolute worse thing to do with them and tumbling is probably the second worse thing. Put the two together and you have a disaster.

http://www.findmall.com/read.php?26,1771815


You can do what you want with them actually. I just put in my 2