Restoring Gilt Buttons

[Neil in West Jersey]

Over the years I have been using hot peroxide to remove dirt from buttons. I recently read about the use of phosphoric acid to clean rust off of metal and thought it might be a good method to clean the buttons without removing the gilt. Yesterday I dug a nice early two piece button, so I decided to try aluminum jelly which is available in any hardware store (Naval Jelly should work as well, my local store had both.)

Well here are the results! Needless to say this will only work if there is still gilt remaining on the button, but tonight I will go through my hundreds of buttons to see if any are candidates for this treatment.

 

[ronaldj2]

Thanks for the tip, be careful !! Oh yeah, nice button.