I'm sorry...I mis-typed. I meant distilled water. I had been reading a manual about something I required DI water and my brain got its wires crossed.
I need to step back a moment and get a basic understanding of how PVC interacts with a coin. For this I'm going to limit my thinking to coins with a silver content. 1. Is what we call "PVC damage" a chemical reaction between PVC and the coining metal? 2. Since most modern US silver coins are 90% silver and 10% copper, are both those metals affected by PVC? 3. Does the removal of the "PVC damage" also result in the removal of the coining metal, i.e., pitting of a coin's surface? 4. Anything else that I couldn't think of?
PVC "damage" can be the appearance of an oily residue on a coin due to the plasticizer dioctyl phthalate (DOP) bleeding out of the PVC plastic. Once the coin has the oily DOP on the surface, it can trap and hold closely to the surface many contaminants, one of which could be hydrogen chloride gas from the PVC decomposition. When the hydrogen chloride gas interacts with water, we call it hydrochloric acid and this will damage many surfaces. A sign of damage would be the appearance of a color, indicating the hydrochloric acid had interacted with some of the metal. If this is removed in a short time, there would be damage, but not enough to detect. Left longer, yes it would damage the coin (pitting, etc.)
I would think so. DI water has all ions removed. There is no salts of any kind or other charged particles. So yes. I would think it’s overkill for this though.
DI water is easier to make for big companies, although it might have volatile chemicals in it. BTW, my pictures were funky...retaking.
