When I first recieved some old coins from my brother, and before I read anything about coins, I attempted to clean some of them using chemicles like "GooGone" as well as household soap. :headbang: The coins are not ruined, but I was wondering if I might be able to redeem this stupid mistake. Any tips?
Nope, sounds like you learned from your error, Maybe they aren't damaged too badly, could be a cheap lesson Don't clean em... B
Everybody makes mistakes when they start out. One of mine was buying a raw trade dollar on Ebay, that turned out to be counterfeit. Charlie
You never stated what type of coins you cleaned. Where they valuable ones or just common ones? Where they in great condition or heavily worn? Very old or what? One of the things I've done with some luck on cleaned coins is to soak a piece of cotton with gun bluing solution and hold the coin in that for a few seconds. This will make copper coins look fairly old and used. I doubt it would fool a grading service but it makes them look basically uncleaned. Don't work great with modern nickel materials though but will work to a small degree.
All of the coins are 20th century from various contries, and not of terribly much value or importance (and not in very bad or very good condition either). Based on the current condition, I'd say I can probably still trade them to another amateur collector. I also still have quite a few uncleaned coins in my small collection, so it's not a HUGE problem.
Kenneth, we all learn from mistakes... hopefully it was a common coin that u cleaned. ... when i first started out, i didn't have any experienced collectors around me, so i cleaned(polished to be exact) many uncirculated coins with 'autosol' coz i thought the luster looked dull... :headbang: Glad that you found CT forum early.
When I was little, I took all of my wheatbacks and cleaned them ALL with copper cleaner, they were very shiny, but worthless. At least we both learned from coins that weren't our prized possesions
