Cleaned Coins

I bought a 1911D Barber dime. It's an F12 coin but seems to have been cleaned. (The dealer said it's too clean & polished.) How many points do I need to deduct?

 

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I believe if it were to be submitted to a grading service (hypothetically) it would say "Cleaned" "F12 Details". Cleaned pretty much trumps it. I could be wrong, but that is what I've commonly seen.

 

As Evil said, they append the "cleaned" prefix to the grade.

 

I just noticed I posted this in the wrong forum. Maybe I should re-post it over in the US Coins forum.

But how do I place a value on such a coin?

 

I bought a 1911D Barber dime. It's an F12 coin but seems to have been cleaned. (The dealer said it's too clean & polished.) How many points do I need to deduct?

 

You only need to post one thread per topic. Find some price guides if you can, or contact a dealer if there is one near you, for more exact pricing, but you could probably expect somewhere around $3-$5*.

 

Cleaned or whizzed ???

 

"Whizzed" as in "buffed"? I am no expert, but I don't see many obvious marks on the coin that would suggest it's been buffed by a machine or other device. It sure is clean, though, with the exception of one small dark spot.

 

I think the silver value in the coin is over $2.00.

 

was the small dark spot on the rim of the coin?

 

Sorry your right. Forgot about the silver content. You could probably get in the range of $3-$5. The silver value is around $2.70 or so.

 

Wouldn't this depend upon "how" it was cleaned? I mean, if a coin is cleaned by dunking it in a hypothetical bath of solvent that wouldn't affect the metal, wouldn't it appear cleaner than expected without any actual evidence of cleaning? The issue lies in the coin being polished, I think. That would make it ungradable due to an altered surface. Also, polish would remove some of the silver, so you would have less than $2.70 in silver content. I've always viewed cleaned coins as basically PO1.

 

Those solvents that are sold to clean coins actually affect the metal alot. They directly affect the metal as a matter of fact. Believe it or not but the way they clean coins is by stripping off the layers of metal. What comes off is very very thin but, technically damaging nonetheless. Cleaning and polishing are different. You should never do either, because you are damaging them. There is visible evidence of both to the trained eye.

$2.70 is an approximation. With the prices of silver rising you would end up with more even with polishing..

 

In general a "cleaned" coin will realize about 1/3 of it's value in the collector side of numismatics. A true key/rarity will bring a bit more. In this case a 1911d f12 will only bring melt.

 

I specifically said solvent that wouldn't affect the metal, because that's what I meant. If you use a bath of acetone or alcohol, hypothetically the metal would be unaffected, as the solvents would only take as solute carbon-based molecules. (At least, that's what I vaguely recall from the introductory o-chem course that I took. Go figure... THIS is what I use 2 hours a night of reading/studying o-chem for... and even with o-chem accounting for 60% of my study time... the best I could muster was a B for my lab and A- for the course.)

KoinJester, that's pretty interesting on the 33% value thing. I didn't know it was that high!

 

I have used acetone and you cannot tell the coin was cleaned because frankly the acetone does not remove very much. Only fairly loose things and oils, but even that only really works when you catch it right after it got dirty, fingerprinted, oil on it, etc. The thing is, the longer something is on a coin, fingerprint for example, it will start to etch into a coin and acetone will not do anything to it. That is why you can buy cleaners that actually strip the metal, because that is the only that can get that off. The OP specifically said it was cleaned in which case acetone was not used, because acetone evaporates completely and frankly doesn't clean enough to notice that much change. Plain and simple something that is not strong enough to damage the metal, is also not strong enough to truly clean the coin. This is why you should never clean a coin, because basically it turns into, thinking you're cleaning a coin when you really aren't, or actually damaging instead of cleaning the coin. The majority of the time it turns into damage..

 

Also did not know this. Always learning here!

 

No, it's obliterating the "f" in the word "of" on the obverse.

 

You know a lot more about this than me. I have three coins that appear to be cleaned, including an 1801 vg8 cent and an 1869 f12 cent. I would like to believe I could pick up more than a third of their value, especially on the 1801 cent, since I paid almost full value for it (not suspecting at the time it was cleaned).

 

Well in that case it all depends on who you sell it too. If someone sold it to you and you did not know it was cleaned, you could very well do the same thing. I'm not advocating this as the right thing to do, but it happened to you didn't it? You may very well be able to get more than a third of there value anyway, but almost certainly not full value. Those ones are quite a bit older, so you might get a slight rarity bonus.