Been meaning to try this for years, but didn't have enough nickels to feel like it was worth it. I had 4 dateless nickels I've found from nickel box searching that I tried this on. I found: 1916-S (turns out I was right about what I thought the date was!) 1918 1919 1921 This is kind of fun and honestly wish I had more dateless nickels to try this on lol. Of course I'd rather find ones with already readable dates, but still.
That absolutely can be fun. If you have a local dealer you like he probably has bags full of no-date buffalo's he would let you have for a song.
To your point, these are some of the dateless nickels I recovered during CRH events. Folks would be surprised at what flows through their fingers.
I feel like dateless Buffalo nickels are an interesting probe into how collectors affect circulating coinage. You used to find wheat cents frequently in circulation, but you'd never find an S-VDB, and probably not even a semi-key like 1914-D or 1931-S. Same thing with 1916-D dimes or 1932-D/S quarters - they were much harder to find than their mintages would suggest. Pickle a bunch of Buffalos, though, and you're actually fairly likely to uncover at least a few key dates. After the dates wore off and collectors couldn't spot them, it seems like they kept circulating in proportion to their actual mintages. One of the reasons I've asked about restoring dates on silver: there are some really desirable key dates in the Standing Liberty series, and those also lost their dates quickly. If you could restore dates and have them stick, I'll bet you'd turn up 1921 and 1923-S examples fairly frequently. (I think there was at least one thread here where one of us claimed success, but the TPGs who slab restored-date nickels wouldn't pass the silver coins.) You can still turn up dateless 1916 SLQs, which were truly rare in circulation, if you know the pick-up points that distinguish them from 1917 Type I examples.
I'd imagine silver would react very differently, and wouldn't recommend using nic-a-date on them. Type I & II Standing Liberty quarters had a tendency to end up dateless with enough circulation wear; in 1925 they recessed the date on the coin more (creating Type III) which tended to protect the date from wear a lot better. Coins passed to me by my parents had a nearly dateless SLQ in it but with careful examination and looking at it from several angles, I was able to figure out it was a 1924. Side note, my most recent buffalo nickel find from hunting nickels just barely had the date visible, but I was able to just barely see it was a 1928-D. I often see stores with dateless buffaloes selling them for around 25 to 50 cents each. (They can be especially cheap in bulk.) Cheap way to get some album fillers to use nic-a-date on. I think most TPGs will accept nic-a-dated nickels, label them as damaged, but give a net grade still. Only worth it for some key or semi-key dates though. There's probably a few key or semi-key ones out there in dateless condition; always worth checking if they have a mintmark. Nickels is still something I have fun hunting, as it's reasonably cheap and there's still a good chance of finding things worth the time of searching. I kind of feel when I get to the point of buying specific issues I probably want to aim for better condition. Still, if I see a good bulk deal on dateless buffaloes, I might try it out!
Yeah, Nic-A-Date on silver is a non-starter. I think the experiments reported here used peracetic acid (white vinegar and hydrogen peroxide). I was thinking of trying nitric acid, but I have very little of it (from a silver/gold test kit), and I don't like using it (bad, poisonous smells). The upshot seems to be that etching silver doesn't work as well as etching cupronickel, the restored dates are really fragile, and TPGs don't care to authenticate the coins. I have ideas about why restoring silver is harder, but I'm not enough of a metallurgist to back them up. There's also a risk of miscreants "restoring" any date they want onto a coin by patterning the etching...
