Remember When you first started collecting Coins ....

[jgrinz]

... the coins that were dirty OR were NOT shiney enough for 'your' collection you cleaned and polished them babies up and they looked so PURTY in your albums folders books ...

 

At one time we have all done it .. BEFORE we knew better ... Does any one still have any of those fine coins in rememberance of this sad occurance ??

 

Well in my Pruning I am down to the Collector books - some of the coins I have had a long time ... ... Long Long time. I have books with Liberty Dimes in LOC ( Library of Coins )books - Right Up to Modern Quarters in New Danscos and EVERYTHING in between. Most of the collection were all transferred into nice Brown Danscos so the albums are nice - Some of the Coins however are from the day ...

 

The one I just posted on EBAY last night brought back these sad thoguhts and recollections.

 

It is a COMPLETE SBA set in a New Brown Dansco , when I mean complete its complete - Far date / Near Date / Type1's / Type2's / MS / Proof's and it even has the FDC's ( First Day Coin Covers ) from the reissuance of SBA's in 1999.

 

I look at the coins and think to myself that I have come a long way since those days on this journey we call coin collecting ...

 

oh sorry

 

Well In the auction I had to have a statement saying some coins have been cleaned ( Mostly the proofs arggghhh ) and that they are toning in the Dansco Binder - some rather strangely - But it is an attractive collection for someone which I think they will enjoy and undoubtedly will get a good value with a 9 dollar start ...

 

Thanks for listening to my ramblings and have a Nice Day

[Stanley]

Mike, I certainly do still have a few that I cleaned many years ago. I also have a few that escaped the baking soda and toothbrush massage. I also remember someone saying to me while I was cleaning one of them from the brown patina and admiring it, “you shouldn’t be doing that”.

 

Lucky for me they were not valuable.

[bsshog40]

I think about this everytime I look at my shiny 1898 indian head penny. It looks sooo purty!!!

[zrlevin]

I can proudly say that I haven't done this to anything more valuble than a sackie I pulled from circulation. I used baking soda and a toothbrush, but it didn't help. I never did it again, deeming it ineffective.

[jgrinz]

I am just thankfull I was MORE in the KNOW when assembling the Mercury Dimes and Walking Halfs

[Stanley]

I can proudly say that I haven't done this to anything more valuble than a sackie I pulled from circulation. I used baking soda and a toothbrush, but it didn't help. I never did it again, deeming it ineffective.

Zach, congratulations.

 

You are among the new generation who has quicker access to information that wasn’t available when I become interested in numismatics.

[MBA101]

My favorite thing to do when I was a kid, was to use Brasso on pennies. More as a joke actually, but it really made President Lincoln look nice and shiney!

 

But for whatever reason, I had it in the back of my head that cleaning was bad, and did not think that anyone would have the stupidity to actually ruin a coin by cleaning it. Consider it youthful ignorance. Took me 30 years to figure out what cleaning looked like in a coin and that many many coins have been cleaned at one time or another...

[TomB]

I cleaned some branch-mint Wheat cents from the 1930s with Tarnex in the early 1970s. They looked awful.

[Coin]

Wow , Mike .... this post brings back the old memories .... I still have one of my silver war nickels that had a large black gooey-guck thing stuck on Jefferson's forehead....the coin had more details than I ever found on a silver nickel at that time, ( I was about 9 years old and into my second year of accummulating- I guess I was a YM 'young - miser') ....anyway , I didn't think a coin could be struck any better than this rare find , so I did what any kid would do first...I tried to pop it off with my fingernail on it's edge....voila! It popped off , but underneath was some awful dark spots....so I , the country boy , broke out the ole pocket knife and tried the next thing...lightly scraping where my fingernail couldn't...I did not damage the coin too bad...but did destroy any chance of it being collectible . I still have it as my lesson learned coin and probably will not part with it ...I've had it this long and still to this day , occasionally pull it out and look at it.

 

What I used to do for fun as a kid with coins ....and still do(rarely)...is whenever I'm at a fast food place like McD's or BK ....I look through my pocket change and try to find a common but medium brown circulated/damaged lincoln cent . I then take the packs of ketchup and squeeze myself out a pile for the fries . I then find a pointed fry and get a small amount of ketchup and start painting it on lincoln's face and neck in dabs. I'll let the cent sit for about a minute and let the acid in the sauce go to work. I then wipe it off , take the water condensation from the side of the cup and 'rinse' the residue and re-wipe on the napkin. By the time I'm finshed eating I usually have one or two Lincoln's with interesting faces...I've gotten it down to where I leave the eye untouched and even done a few 'reverse tone' faces leaving the face and neck brown .Pin-stripping the jacket is hard but do-able if you use packs of Heinz for some reason . I know this is probably a VERY bad habit , but it is kinda stuck....good thing I didn't try making hobo nickels .

[jgrinz]

 

I am still trying to type after roaring with laughter at your response ...

 

[CoinCurious]

 

OK, Im off to the kitchen, I hope I have Heinz ketchup.

[hoard]

still have what is left of a 1943S cent that needed to be restored. I have never upgraded it to remind me of what not to do.

[dorkdog-migration]

Oh my...

 

Imagine the treatment I got when my dad came home to find his 1941-1967 Lincoln cent book (this was in 1968) AND his 1909-1941 books had been gone through, the coins removed and cleaned with, I believe salt and vinegar? I could be wrong, but the coins all came out the color of say, plumbing copper pipe.

 

May I disgrace myself further by adding that it was a complete set? Except for the 22P

 

I spent a lot of money replacing that set...

[MunkyMan95]

Ouch. Uh... Ouch. I'm speechless. Ouch.

[MorganMan]

Yup, brings back memories. I still have an old whitman book full of pennies that wore out several pencil erasers......

 

Boy, they sure do look funny today, not quite as shiny as they were when I did it as a kid......

 

Luckily, they were all well circulated stuff.....

 

I never got around to polishing dad's 1909 S VDB......Oh well, maybe soon....

 

 

MM

[JimT-migration]

As a kid I used brass cleaner on the first wheaties I bought. Nothing rare or expensive fortunately. They're still in the album.

[WoodenJefferson]

Do not try this at home...this was done in an era when toothpaste tubes were made of lead! (This would explain a lot of those memory losses when engaged in a question & answer period with my dear wife)

 

Never ever try and hide something you don't want your kids to find, children have a quality about them, especially on rainy days a "hidden radar" capability. With this talent, they will find what ever it is that you are trying to keep from them. With this said, my brother and I found the hidden bottle of liquid mercury in the basement of our home one day. It was stashed away, hidden from view up in the dusty old rafters. Jumping up and swinging from the cross members from rafter to rafter, I spotted the dusty old bottle so neatly tucked away. My father at the time worked in a foundry and I'm sure that the mercury was used as a catalyst at the plant but even he should have never brought this into a home with children. Perhaps he was just as curious about this stuff as we were when we found his hiding place or it may have been there already when we moved in in 1948, who’s to say?

 

The shimmering metal was housed in a 1/2 pint glass bottle with a black bake-a-lite cap. There was a single label pasted across the front that said "Mercury" with a symbol. (I had to look the symbol up, it was Hg).Now, to a young mind, this was some pretty amazing stuff. It was a metal, yet liquid, it was heavy like metal but flowed like heavy water. As the bottle was tilted back and forth, the contents glimmered and rippled and felt cool to the touch.

 

We knew enough that this was something strange and exotic and not to touch it.

 

We just knew we had to pour some of it out to get a better look at this new found stuff. My older brother did the pouring...carefully, just to get a little pool out onto the surface of the workbench. Smiling in total amazement, we poked and prodded and chased the rounded glob of fun around until it came time to get our new found prize back into the bottle. Oh-oh...how do you get something that is almost impossible to corral back into a bottle?

 

While thinking about this, the correlation between liquid Mercury and the Mercury Dime seemed to almost fit like two pieces of a puzzle. Since by this tender age our brain stem had not yet fully developed, we decided to find out what would happen if a dime came into contact with a puddle of liquid gloss.

 

When I was a kid, Mercury dimes were still in circulation, so a hurried and frenzied attempt to get a dime to slide back out through the slot of the piggy bank was quickly done. I was an expert at getting money back out of that bank, not so good at putting it in. With Mercury dime in hand I dipped it into the viscous liquid and low and behold, the mercury clung to the dime like clean sheets on a bed. Amazed once again, the dime was placed right on top of the pool of mercury. The thin dime quickly slid off to the side but was attracted to the surface none the less. With a little help from acid brushes the entire surface of the dime was now glimmering with a thin coating of what looked like a mirror!

 

The shine was unlike any shine we'd ever seen on a coin...we did quarters and even a Franklin half dollar. They glimmered in the light, a sheen that we were proud to display to our closest friends. They too were amazed and they also wanted to see how we pulled off this magical display.

 

In our Laboratory, we coated countless coins that day till we finally ran out of silver coins. With the bottom of the shoebox full of glimmering coins, we folded paper and swept the globs of mercury up and quietly returned the glass bottle back to the rafters from where it came. I hid the coins in the PF Flyer shoebox under my bed and looked at them once more before going off to dream of sitting on piles of glimmering coins.

 

That morning, the first thing I did was pull out the shoe box and to my dismay, the coins were already starting to dull. The feeling of defeat over whelmed me, the process we did to change the coins to something of beauty was fast fading. By the next day, the coins had turned dull grey and it looked like an ash had encrusted the coins. Oxidation had already taken it's toll so I attempted to washed them with soap and water but the damage had already been done. Oh well, back into the piggy bank form whence they came.

 

As each of the coins were later retrieved from the bank to buy penny candy, or to sip cherry cokes at the local fountain, the crusty looking coins would bring back a flash of brilliant memory. It was not until I got into High School Chemistry that I learned about the dangers of Mercury/Quicksilver and shudder to think what harm may have been done, if any. This childhood tinkering also got me interested in coins and I figured if the mercury laden fillings in my teeth or the lead Ipana squeeze toothpaste tubes didn't kill me, futzing with globs of silver looking liquid metal wouldn't have either.

 

~Woody~

[jgrinz]

I love it ... I knew this thread would bring up some dark deep memories ..

Congrats on the winner so far hahah

 

OH yeah also VICTOR would approve of your grammer and spelling too

 

[TJ'S Coins]

I cleaned some branch-mint Wheat cents from the 1930s with Tarnex in the early 1970s. They looked awful.

 

Around 1969 my sister, mother and I used Tarnex on several Morgan and Peace silver dollars and other assorted coins from the cent through half dollar. They all came out shiny and nice. Only now, almost 40 years later, are the ones in an album taking on a new skin.

 

When my sister and her husband temporarily resided at my mother's home in 1979, my sister went through the coin collection and took all the sliver dollars, a gold token I had purchased and several other coins I had acquired over the years before they moved across the country. They never mentioned this to my mother or me. I discovered it months later. The coins that she took were most of the ones we had used Tarnex on. She left me the lower valued coins that were unmolested.

 

After returning to active collecting I asked her specifically about two of the coins that I wanted back. She didn't say a word while we driving with my family. I thought she didn't hear me as she quickly changed the conversation. That Christmas I received the two coins and several others in a package from her. It was nice to have them back..

 

Using Tarnex and cleaning coins in general was all the rage among my friends as we delved into the coin hobby in the late '60's through early '70's.(Brillo pads do leave scratches even as they shine ) Fortunately we didn't have any truly valuable rare coins but ones that had been saved out of circulation or hoarded by relatives.

 

While I cringe thinking about cleaning coins today I think back fondly to the joy of receiving Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes and even a very well worn Standing Liberty Quarter as change when spending my allowance. YN's today cannot relate to finding coins in circulation completely different from the ones in current use. Seeing a Walking Liberty Half Dollar plucked from change caused me to double takes as a youth. They were so different from the shiny Franklin's and Peace Dollar's I'd get for my birthday or Christmas.