Do you Consider a Dipped Coin to Be Cleaned?

For those who still think that dipping coins is: a mistake, a bad idea, harmful to the coin, or just plain wrong - allow me to offer a couple of scenarios.

You own a rather common coin based on date/mint, it's been graded and slabbed as MS63 and is worth $200-$300 as a general rule, and it has heavy, quite dark toning. You take that coin to somebody who knows what they are doing and they dip the coin for you - it comes out beautifully ! Yeah it's blast white but it has gorgeous luster, barley a mark to be seen, so you resubmit it for grading. It comes back MS65 and is now worth $700-$800.

Is that a bad thing ? Or a good thing ?

Same scenario, only this time with a scarce maybe even rare coin. This one recently sold for $56,000. You owned it, you sold it. But the new owner is a dealer who knows what he is doing when dipping coins. So he dips the coin, and it comes out beautifully. He resubmits the coin, it's upgraded 2 MS grades and he puts it back on the market immediately. Bear in mind this is less than 3 months after you sold the coin. It sells of course, this time for $126,000.

Is that a bad thing, or a good thing ? Kinda depends on who's answering doesn't it - you, or the dealer who bought it.

Here's the thing, both of these scenarios have actually occurred. The first, more times than you can count and with coins worth up to and including 5 figures, and it continues to happen on a daily basis. The second, less often of course but enough times that it's pretty well known.

There's also a 3rd scenario that has played out many times, it goes kind of like this. You have always been against the idea of dipping coins and typically only buy those coins you believe to be original, most of them with heavy dark toning at least around the outer edges but also more of the coin and in some cases the entire coin. You keep these coins for years, decades, never allowing them to be dipped. But eventually you sell them, as is, and the new owner decides to dip them.

But when does he is sadly disappointed. The coins are dipped correctly, every single one, but only a few turn out well - those you had owned the least amount of time. With the rest, the advanced toning had already done its damage, the luster on the coin had already been destroyed and the coins were now worth but a fraction of what he paid for them.

But if you had dipped those coins 10 years ago, 20 years ago - this would not have been the case. Some if not most of the luster would still be there then. And the life of those coins would have been prolonged, and greatly so. And today they would be worth multiples of what they are now, maybe many multiples.

You see toning, when it is allowed to progress unchecked and not removed, is destructive. This is a fact, an absolute and undeniable fact. It's simple chemistry and physics. Yeah it's fine, even very desirable, in its earlier and even middle stages. But once it progresses beyond a certain point - it's already too late.

Your goal was to preserve the coins by leaving them as they are - in your eyes original. But by doing what you did you have destroyed them, condemned them to a certain death. Call it the law of unintended consequences if you like, you had good intentions after all. You just didn't realize that there comes a point that in order to preserve the coin, to prolong its life, toning must be carefully and correctly removed.

I believe it could be argued that over the years toning has probably destroyed more coins than even all the centuries of harsh cleaning by ignorant and uneducated collectors. And all of them could have been saved had only they known. As matter of fact, the vast majority of all the nice coins you know of - the only reason you know of them is because they were saved - by dipping.

 

I pretty much agree with just about everything you said Jeff. And your post made me realize I left a critical part of my comments out in my post above - namely that once dipped, the coins need to be stored correctly. If they are, then toning will progress at a slow rate.

As for your comments about freshly dipped coins being highly susceptible to toning, that is indeed true. And there is a ton of evidence to prove it. A freshly dipped coin is just as susceptible to toning as a freshly minted coin is - but not more susceptible. And the reason both are susceptible is because the luster is fresh, untoned at that moment in time. Freshly dipped and freshly minted coins are both more susceptible to toning than say a coin that has already been around a few years and already has some toning. That said, once they acquire that initial toning, they are then no more susceptible to toning than the other coin is - assuming storage conditions and environment are the same.

This is where people get the idea that initial toning, early toning, light toning, pick your term, protects coins from further toning. But it doesn't really protect them from it, it merely slows it down from what it was when the coin was fresh. All coins will continue to one as long as air can get to them - no matter what stage of toning they have.

This is all true because of the fragile nature of luster, or rather the very peaks of the flow lines that create luster. In other words if you imagine this as being a flow line - /\ - the very peak of it tones faster than the edges do further down from the peak. This is because at the peak the metal is only a molecule or two thick so more of it is exposed to the air, but further down it's much thicker and only the very surface of it is exposed to the air.

Think of the peak of the flow line as being like a tiny, very thin bead of metal that is only touched, and thus somewhat protected from the air, at its very bottom edge.

Further down the edge of the flow line the metal is surrounded on all sides by other metal with only the very top of it exposed to the air.