Are Crusted worth it?

Just curious to get some opinions on whether buying crusted coins and cleaning them are worth it.

 

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Other will differ, but to me it is not worth it. I would rather spend my money on specific coins I wanted than spending months of my time and finding mostly junk. However, if you are someone who thinks they will enjoy the cleaning process itself then go for it. It all depends on what you mean by "worth it".

 

What's currently on the market is by and large junk. If you want to get them for the fun of cleaning they're OK but as far as I he value of the coins when you're done you're better off buying already cleaned coins. Most of the coins worth cleaning are cleaned by the same people digging them up.

 

Welcome to coin talk, I don't have much experience cleaning crusted, but perhaps gsimonel might advise I know from his previous write ups he has extensive knowledge on it.

 

I have 2 I bought for cheap that I am going to clean. Mostly to check the process and see if it becomes of any. I figured the good ones are picked through and the cheaper are sold off.

 

Thank you for the welcome and I will look for their write up. Any information is good information.

 

Personally, I do not have the patience to clean. However, I know folks love the experience of cleaning as part of the Hobby. I enjoy the Hobby via capturing Historical Placemarkers... and am not a Numismatist.

Good luck and I hope a lot of enjoyment comes from your cleaning project. I would be interested in seeing your before and after results!

Welcome to the Ancients forum.

 

Thank you I will need the luck since I don't know what I'm doing yet. I took a picture of the coins a day after soaking in distilled water.

 

Welcome, leave them for at least a week, changing the water as it becomes cloudy, then have a little pick. They can easily stay in DW for many weeks.

 

Hi MFish. Welcome to the forum.

Cleaning ancient coins was a recent topic of discussion (https://www.cointalk.com/threads/coin-cleaning-help.300290/). Here's a copy of what I wrote there:

*****

Consider following "Glenn's Ever-Increasing Cycle of Harshness" when cleaning coins. (I just made this term up.) Always start at the lowest level and work your way up. Totally exhaust the possibility of success at one level before moving on to the next.

Glenn's Ever-Increasing Cycle of Harshness:
1) brush off with a toothbrush with the vinyl bristled trimmed down to about 1/8". If needed, pick at the dirt with a toothpick or bamboo skewer;

2) soak in distilled or de-ionized water (never tap water) for a few days to a week or so and then scrub with a toothbrush and some mild dish washing liquid. Rinse off and put back in DW and wait some more. Repeat for a few weeks or months or until you can't see any improvement;

3) repeat the above, but then lightly scrub the coin with a brass bristle brush. Bronze coins only! Never use a brass brush on a silver coin. Check the coin carefully to make sure you aren't damaging the patina. Brass is softer than bronze, so the bristles won't scratch the metal, but some coins, usually light green to green in color, have very soft patinas, and you can ruin this kind of a patina with a brass brush. Never use a steel bristle brush--it will scratch the metal;

4) Make a brass tool by buying a brass rod from a hobby or hardware store and filing one end into a sharp point. Look at the coin under a stereo microscope and use your brass tool to pick dirt out of crevices. Best to have a couple of different tools with different points--blade-like, needle-like, etc.;

5) Electrolysis. The last straw, used only in desperation. Will strip off everything on the surface and take you down to bare metal. Contrary to what a lot of people say, it will not cause pitting or destroy the surface of the coin, but it will reveal any problems that may have been hiding under the patina (such as pitting or a destroyed surface).

Many people experiment with different chemicals. I haven't found any that I thought worked very well, but if you want to try some, I'd suggest inserting their use between steps 4 and 5. Never use any acid, such as lemon juice or Pepsi, though. They will eat into the coin's surface. You're better off just going with electrolysis.

*****

As to whether or not crusties are worth it, it depends on what you paid for them and what your goal is. You're not going to buy any nice ancient coins for $1-2 each, so why not try your luck with a couple of crusties? If someone is asking $4-5 each, however, then they'd better be nicer than the average crusty that you find on eBay. Cleaning coins is an inexpensive way to get introduced to ancient coins. No harm in it, in my opinion.

That is, except for the "gateway" effect . . .

 

Thank you. This seems like solid advise. I didn't think about trimming the toothbrush and the use of a brass bristle. I will give it a try and let you know how it turns out. I will just have to learn patience and persistence.

 

Haha YESSSS!

 

Welcome @MFish . For a patient person with time for the effort cleaning coins can be interesting.
I found buying coins that are cleaned far more interesting for me. I am sure you will find few coins from my collecting area, Roman Republic, that will clean to the condition I collect (which is not that high).

 

We are on the wrong end of the curve, unfortunately.

I had a chance last year to buy 25 "uncleaned silver Denarius ($2 something) and I hesitated they would have been FUN!

Today expect to be rewarded SLIGHTLY working with AE 3s 4s

The big stuff will be picked over 5 times before you get it.

AD

 

Cleaning them can be fun. You should give it a try. The likelihood of discovering any high quality coins in the pile is minimal because most of the uncleaned lots have been thoroughly picked over and those with the most potential have been removed. You might find a good one that was missed however. If you’re a collector like myself, I’m not looking for a perfect coin. Ancients are not perfect. They’re produced by imperfect human hands using imperfect methods. They’re damaged from handling by many people and from being in the ground for two thousand years. All of them are perfectly flawed.

 

I agree with what Glenn wrote in points 1-4 but differ after that. I see #5 electrolysis not as a medical treatment like you get at a doctor's office or hospital but the equivalent of a post-mortem exam in the morgue. You don't learn what the coin is but what it was before it died.

My second disagreement comes in the 'no harm' assessment. Coin cleaning is a second hobby separate from coin collecting. If a person tries and fails or decides it is more trouble than it is worth they end to blame the hobby of ancient coins and decide to collect something that is not so labor intensive like proof sets. If you collect, study, enjoy coins first and then decide you want to take on a side hobby (there are others like photography, die studies & fly-specking minor variations) I support the idea fully. None of these side hobbies are great paths into the main hobby - the coins. We are regularly asked to identify ghosts of former coins that have been destroyed by millennia of corrosion and minutes of cleaning. Owners of such coins would not have to ask if they had started by studying coins with details intact. I once declared that about 80% of the coins I had seen in uncleaned lots commonly sold to beginners fell into one of twelve groups and suggested those cleaning such coins might benefit from recognizing those twelve.
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/uncleaned.html
My math may be faulty but I do remain of the opinion that the proper Order of Operations for studying (not necessarily owning) coins is the following:
1. Perfect - Learn what the coins looked like in the mind of the designer when the dies were made and mint workers did good work. You do not have to own them but you should recognize them

2. Exceptional - Learn what it is reasonable to expect of a well made coin that circulated as money but really did not suffer greatly. These are not overly worn, corroded, damaged or anything evil - just old.

3. Middle of the Road - Learn to allow for what wears off coins and what happens when Perfect and Exceptional coins meet up with normal stress of being what they were meant to be.

4. Dirty - Realize that ancient coins usually spent some time buried in the ground and came out with soil or something more sinister adhering to the surfaces. The big thing to learn here is how to tell the ones in pile #4 that have a chance of being freed from that dirt and rising to a higher state. Some people are very good at this.

5. Awful - These are the fun coins. We buy them realizing that nothing will come of cleaning off the dirt except the experience and the hope that one in a thousand will turn out to be a little interesting. There is the uncleaned equivalent of a lottery ticket actually worth the dollar you paid for it not counting the fun you had playing in the dirt. Sure there is the lottery ticket coin worth a Million and they come out almost as often do the Powerball winners. Like Lottery Tickets, Class #5 coins only stay #5 for one owner/looker. After it has been identified and evaluated it becomes a 3 or a 6.

6. Sellers - Sadly these are the coins that those 'in the know' looked at and decided they were not worth the effort and the ones that were cleaned to some degree and discovered to be really worthless. What do we do with them? Sell them to someone else, of course. Reapplying dirt is cheating and no one would do that, would they?

My point here is that class 6 coins are not the place to start. If you did the study of 1, 2 and 3 so you might recognize #4 with hope, I can live with you buying them. What I have issue with is the market we see in group 6 coins over and over and over again.

If you did not pick up that my suggested order of operations was PEMDAS, shame on your 4th grade teacher.

 

Yea, I dont clean coins. Most people dont. There is little to come from it other than destroyed coins. But, my experience has shown me over the last 30 years that if one asks about it they probably are already committed to it. So, electrolysis. I have seen disastrous results but also some of the best I have ever seen. There is a Yahoo group, not really active anymore. Was really active 10 years ago, but join and you can peruse the archives:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CoinZappers/info

 

I bought a few uncleaned lots and had some fun cleaning them up. However, be advised that the vast majority of "uncleans" are the 4th century bronze little bronze coins issued from the time of Constantine up until the time of Arcadius and Honorius.

Even if you do clean them, they will not be worth much. My results using the various methods have been mixed. I used distilled water and a toothbrush to start out, then moved on to soaking in olive oil, which I find significantly darkened the coins, then I used a dental pick to remove the crud. Only a few after cleaning revealed patinas and interesting features on the coins.

Most were just junk.

However, it was an interesting way to re-enter the hobby a couple of years ago. Be advised as well that most of the "good" coins have been removed by the folks who dug them up.

 

Consider cleaning coins like food or any other consumable product. If you do so, they will have no value afterwards (or at least .000001 of what you paid, anyway). If it makes you happy, do so. But dont consider for a moment anyone would buy one of them from you, because they wont. I have been approached by many countless people at coin shows where they want to sell me their 'treasure' that they bought on Ebay and then cleaned. They seem to think its a scam when I tell them it has no value. I might be more willing to buy their grandmothers old socks than the coins they bring me.

 

I'll be interested in getting an update from you on your coin-cleaning success, as well as your interest in collecting ancients, after you've finished your efforts in this area.

This thread, and other related threads on this site, have a lot of interesting insights into the cleaning vs. collecting issue. My curiosity is whether you find any of those insights to be the same as your own.