So here's the coin. Another big uncleaned from DOC. My issue is I can't get anything to come off this coin. I've soaked it in water and in 35% H2O2. The surface is hard and my Andre pencils do nothing but skim over it. At this point I'm willing to try electrolysis, but if anyone has a different, less shocking method, I would appreciate it. Anyone able identify it with just this?
I'm taking a stab in the dark here, but it may be Commodus with Victory walking left reverse. As far as cleaning, I have no advice since I am terrible at it.
Honestly I don't believe that there is much chance of cleaning your coin any further, the pictures suggest to me that the brass/bronze is eroded and that the patina is likely too thin to be hiding much additional detail anywhere except maybe the crevices around the obverse bust. When looking for promising uncleaned coins it's good to study pictures looking for smooth areas of clean stable original surface patina, often on high points or spots in the fields where the dirt crust already flaked off, but with most of the coin being too caked with deposits to look particularly appealing at first glance to most potential competitors. Often the best results come from coins with a black or very dark brown patina under a lighter dirt crust, as the patina is usually quite strong and easy to see contrasted with lighter dirt while cleaning under 20x with fine pen/needle tools.
Ah, far superior pictures and indeed better than my own abilities would permit even if I hadn't left my camera 1000 miles away! As suspected, your coin is unfortunately too environmentally corroded/eroded to be worth any further efforts. Maybe some crud in the recesses around the face could be removed, like in the eye and chin/neck area, but sadly most original surface metal has been eroded and the rough dirty looking surfaces you see are only thinly patinated without anything more below. Not sure if you want to see examples of good dirty coins I've bought to clean up but I've noticed that most collectors, myself included, have faced significant challenges and disappointment when dabbling with "unsearched uncleaned" batches and often wash their hands of the whole idea before learning how to look for truly high quality but dirty (and hopefully unrecognized by competition) coins for bargain prices. I started with andres pencils but they are awful for cleaning coins, like using a meat cleaver to perform what should be laparoscopic microsurgery. They're ok for larger and less detailed items than coins but really should be avoided in my opinion. My world changed when I got a cheap 20x binocular microscope and some diamond dusted pin tool tips and the pen sized clamp to hold the cleaning tips. Then I discovered that using my wife's sewing pins allowed even finer and more agile cleaning, and they can be sharpened (or faceted, dulled, whatever the detail that needs cleaning requires) with a honing stone or fine grit sandpaper very quickly. I also made and use copper tools made from scrap wire of decent gauge cut to 5-7 inches with each tip hammered into a square/diamond cross section, then sharpened as fine as possible with a stone, care taken to preserve the 4 sharp 90 degree edges leading to the point. Soft copper tools require very frequent resharpening but are excellent for AE coins with a soft or fragile patina requiring something tougher than wood or bamboo, and also for cleaning silver coins which are soft and delicate and usually shouldn't be cleaned with much at all let alone metal implements but when called for the copper wire tools are often just hard enough to bust through an offending tumor of crud that wood can't while being much more forgiving than other harder metal tools. Frequent sharpening is not ideal but especially for bronzes, the tool being soft enough to wear down and leave streaks of copper on the surface instead of scratching through the patina and damaging the coin is a very forgiving warning system letting you know to adjust pressure/direction of cleaning before causing injury. Not sure if you're interested but I don't recall reading about anyone arriving upon sewing pins and copper wire as preferred tools so it might be useful to keep in mind if you want to go deeper into ancient coin cleaning.
Agreed; appears like bare metal already, with nothing to be cleaned further. Tried that, but switched to high precision cutters. It provides good grip and good precision; new blades are ideal for letters and high precision cleaning and used blades are good for everything else. Cutter and 5 blades come for less than 5 EUR. https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32867062849.html
Do you use special blades or those pictured in the provided link? I have gobs of xacto hobby cutting/carving tool handles and hundreds of blades including many like yours but haven't experimented much with them as the most promising finest blades I tried were still too big, I found that cheapo pins or touger actual sewing needles custom sharpened for the particular zone to be cleaned were far less clunky and clumsy. Most coins I clean are small Greek fractions under 3 grams though, rarely do I get ones over 8 grams, so if one was cleaning beefy sestertii regularly instead of chalkoi I'd imagine a bigger blade and lower magnification might be more efficient and useful?
I have two, and one is like in the pictures. I use the tip of the blade, mostly, which is as sharp as your pins, but easier to hold. I find 20x to be more than enough, and i have bad eyes. Otherwise, 10x would also do, especially for bigger coins.
If I were to want to follow up here, I would start with Septimius Severus from Stobi. Why? The portrait looks like a 3 prong beard Septimius bust. There is an S before the face but the style seems a bit Provincial to me. Most Provincials would use a Greek CEV rather than SEV so I suspect a Latin language Colonial of which Stobi is a common choice. https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=4302524 If you really wanted an ID here, you might have given us details like diameter and weight. I am of the opinion that there is nothing below worth cleaning but I am wrong at least half of the time on subjects much more familiar to me. If I am correct there, you may be as close to an ID as you will get.
