I walked into the kitchen on Sunday afternoon and this is what my wife was doing: Yes, she is cleaning zlincolns found on the yard. Thank heavens for small miracles. You can see she is washing them with Goof-Off, then a bath of baking soda, vinegar and scrubbing them with a toothbrush. She was through and didn't miss a cent. After all had been given an improper bath they were laid out to dry. As we discussed this she told me she would never touch my coins and she was only cleaning them so she could spend them. What a good woman!! Mine are safe and she has clean money to spend.
Looks like some of them are missing enough zinc to not make them worth a full cent. Tell her not to scrub to hard on those or you might lose some more value.
Tell her the next time to pick up a pack of efferdent Throw them in with some hot tap water and wala no scrubbing.
Oh you guys sure gave me a good laugh. She had fun and some of them are in terrible shape. I hope to post another thread soon with a bad case of Zinc rot on some of them. Again, thanks for the laughs. Until morning...
What are You planning to have? A salad? To clean metal detected modern Cents.. Just soak in hot water and then gently scrub. That's all.
I have a handful of change coins I just cannot get cleaned - just to reuse as change. Started with olive oil, vinegar, baking soda, etc. Thinking about just using coca-cola. Ready to just use a buffing wheel LOL
I dug up a 1915 cent in my garden. Most of the lettering (date etc.) was pretty sharp. I rinsed it off with water and almost before my eyes all of the fine features just faded away. Sort of disintegrated. Whatever the soil did to the copper made it soluble in water.
Dude, there is no such word as "wala". The correct term is "voila" (pronounced vwa-la), a French word originally that literally means (loosely) 'look there' or 'there it is'. No excuse for being lazy about using your words... (sorry, I'm a writer by profession and stuff like this gets under my skin)
Coin cleaning the old-fashioned way... Okay, we don't clean coins for collections, but if they are only going to be put back into circulation, what would be wrong with tying them in a sock and letting them bang around against each other as part of a few cycles in your washing machine (not with the good clothes, of course...)? I'm thinking that would be like carrying them around in your pocket for a few years, just normal wear...