Proper acetone procedure

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I'd bet a dollar to a donut that you are talking about what most people call a Q-tip which is a brand name for a cotton swab that they tell you not to use to clean your ears, That would work fine, but then again so would a clean soft towel if you lay the coin on the towel and just blot it without rubbing.

 

Do a seardh, this is a completely different subject. I have seen recommendations to soak the coins for up to a month in water and then use a nylon bristle brush to take off as much crud as possible, followed by a long soak (up to a month again) in olive oil, or some other oil and then the brushing again. Remember these coins are 1000+ years old and have had some rough handling, some cleaning is not likely to hurt them too much.

 

super absorbing cotton takes the water right out and make sure you are only touching the water not the coin. i have tried this on MS coins absolutely no problem

 

yup you nailed it. but do tell me why not use it to clean my ears?

 

you arent used to coins in high relief trapping the water in like a swimming pool. trust me for those you need the q tip

 

They claim you have too much of a probability of 1) packing wax against the eardrum and causing problems or 2) actually puncturing the eardrum. "Never put anything into your ears except your elbows". Canned air would seem to be a good candidate to get into the nooks and crannies.

 

Canned air is not in my coin tools. The reason is that some companies, actually do use compressed air, which can have some oils from the compressor. The cans usually contain gases that are much easier to compress such as tetrafluroethane, or difluorethane . There are "food grade" compressed air to use in manufacturing milk products and other, which is carefully filtered and are said not to come from oil type compressors. Since compressed air is usually the final product put on a coin surface, I would not trust it. IMO.

Jim

 

Good point. In all of my experience cleaning US and ancient coins, I have never needed air. Three baths in distilled water will eliminate any need to dry a coin, as the coin will dry spotless if you did the baths rights. If you didn't, those spots are telling you that you need to give it more baths in distilled water.

 

I wonder if the grading services have a way to remove dust before they place a coin in a slab?

 

Point well taken since I have worked with machine compressed air. Perhaps one of the blower brushes that photographers used to use might serve, or just don't use air.

 

I used to use a polonium charged brush for my negatives ( and it is still around someplace, but many halflifes have gone by) and isn't significantly radioactive any longer. Staticmaster who still makes these, recommends passing the brush area over the object without the brush touching and then using a bulb aspirator ( if you have had kids, you know what these are )to blow the neutralized dust particles away.

Jim

 

I still have a Staticmaster somewhere. It was a great tool in the darkroom.

 

I would be livid if someone dipped my coin without me knowing about it before hand.

 

I realize that I'm late to this discussion, but I do have expertise in the fragrance arena. I work for a fragrance and flavor manufacturing company. A typical fragrance contains thirty or so different materials. Many of these materials are not pure, but are mixtures of multiple materials. There are over 2000 fragrance materials in the fragrance palette. Many of these materials are oils. The fragrance is designed so that it will disperse completely throughout the material it is being used in, which in this particular case is acetone. An incredible amount of research goes in to determining how materials can be used so that we know they are safe for their intended use. I know of no company that has tested fragrances on coins. But from what I know about fragrances, I would not want them anywhere near a coin due to the typical oil content. It's just not a proper use of a fragrance. You might get away with it using a particular nail polish remover, but another containing a different fragrance might be a problem. Worse yet, the problem might take a long time to reveal itself. The bottom line is that you should only use pure acetone.

 

Good information. Anyone wanting to use acetone just go to your local hardware/lumber store and buy a quart for like $8. Keep it away from kids of course.

 

Yup, stay away from anything that has any other ingredients.

 

And pure Acetone is cheap, most hardware stores carry it

 

I've been using acetone for a while now, and I have two questions:

1. How do you know when it needs a longer bath? When there's little to nothing on the coin, it's easy to tell. Most of the acetone baths I do are short. Often within the first 5 minutes I'll notice substantial improvements (if not in a much shorter time frame). But, how do you know if after, say, 1 hour, there's almost no improvement? Do you just leave it in the bath overnight or until the next day because there's nothing to lose except time?

2. Should I flip the coin over to the other side, halfway through the bath? The underside will get acetone on it, but not as much and I've noticed differences where the underside looks different from the opposite side, until I put the underside face up.


And, to add to the acetone procedures mentioned, I like to use a glass jar with a screw down lid for the coins to take a bath in. That'll keep the jar shut, and you can see through the glass. Using a lower height jar will probably be best to more easily place and remove the coins to and from the jar. A wider opening jar helps a lot, too. I like to keep the jar low to the ground and away from light, to keep the acetone cool, but I'm not sure how much of a benefit this'll have on the acetone's process (at the very least, it's out of sight so I don't get any ideas of opening the jar and messing with the coins).

Also, it's nice to use a separate plastic lab bottle (the one you can squirt with that has the extended and angled top) to rinse the coins with acetone when you're done.