George II Conservation 0

[GeorgeII]

Hi, all.  I surface collected this George II half penny on a farm while arrowhead hunting this morning in central Connecticut.  I'm so excited that I found this!  Anyway, I wanted to know how best to conserve it.  I've read a million different opinions and I just wondered if there was a consensus (probably not) on how best to treat this coin.  At the moment, it is soaking in distilled water.  Should I try to remove the green patina at some point with a tooth pick or soft brush, or is that a giant no-no?  I ordered some ren wax and it'll arrive on Monday.  Should it stay in water until the wax comes?  I've got a million questions!  Thanks for looking and I appreciate your feedback!

[JKK]

While it is a very cool find, it doesn't look to me like you are going to remove much corrosion with any means of cleaning. Corrosion is of course a reaction of external factors with the metal, and the result is new compounds that include some of the metal. Over centuries, much metal can be lost, and I think it has been here. I don't think it's coming back. Of course, the flip side of that is that you don't have much to lose by trying.

[GeorgeII]

Thanks for the comment, JKK.  I know I have nothing to lose by trying, but do you think the application of ren wax will prevent further corrosion?

 

[JKK]

It might. Before you seal the surface in, though, I'd think you would want to blow off the corrosion. The only coin I ever considered paste waxing was a coin of Magnentius that had bronze disease, which looks like a smurf sneezed on it, and blowing the disease off the coin took me weeks of patient soaking in the right solution. In the end I did not wax it because I was not sure about the roughened areas where the smurf mucous had been, and because I could always go back and do it later but I could never undo it.