http://realcent.forumco.com/topic~TOPIC_ID~9271.asp Has people giving out good advice, till i saw this: :headbang:
I hope he meant 'cream of tartar,' a weakly acidic powdered food additive, and not tartar sauce (maybe he was thinking crabcakes, not coins!) Hard to believe one could "improve" a copper coin with a rock tumbler.
Why ? It is one of the methods employed by some, and it works. Of course that depends entirely on how you define "improved". Perhaps you are unaware that the the method used by the US Mint to polish planchets prior to striking is very, very similar to using a rock tumbler with small gravel inside. The mint uses basically the same tumbler, but they use various sizes of metal ball bearings as the polishing medium instead of gravel.
I guess polishing mediums vary. I used to bench shoot rifles a long time ago. I'd reload my own ammo for accuracy. I had a brass case cleaner. It was basically a tumbler although it vibrated and didn't actually tumble. A good and popular media was crushed black walnut shells and you could get it commercially from any outlet that handled reloading supplies. Dump a few hundred spent cases in there, turn it on overnight and the next morning they looked brand new so you could inspect them for any cracks prior to reloading.
People been using rock tumblers for years to clean coins for the most part they dont use grevell though LOL there are a number of powders and plastic pellets available.
It just seems to me that gravel in a rock tumbler and a relatively soft copper coin would be a bad combo. A milder abrasive, as suggested above, would probably be more appropriate. I know of some who gently clean their ground finds with a brass wire brush, and some who embed the coin into a slit in a raw potato overnight to remove surface grunge, and they say it works well. To each his own!
Jezzzzz...Wonder why he did not use the "Atomic laser radition ionization" treatment on the ole 1909. Say it ain't so. Traci