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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2284741, member: 1892&quot;]Contemplate this very, very carefully. Dip works by stripping metal from the coin - once it&#039;s gone, it&#039;s gone forever. And there is a level of toning - the very dark stages - where not even the most successful dip can save the coin. It&#039;s all or nothing with removing toning. You don&#039;t walk it back, you strip it away.</p><p><br /></p><p>And a given coin can only stand so many seconds in dip before it&#039;s ruined forever. Each coin differs, depending on a bazillion factors from alloy to strike to the life it&#039;s led since. In any event, it&#039;s measured in seconds. How many seconds can your coin stand? You only know if you exceed it.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a personal rule of thumb I won&#039;t employ thiourea with a coin which has progressed to showing black color anywhere on it. It&#039;s just too risky. And one more thing to consider: It&#039;s very difficult to dip a coin which is not Mint State without making it look silly. I&#039;ve never succeeded, and stopped trying before I killed any more coins.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Seated especially, and to a lesser extent Barber, minor coinage has, to me, to be evaluated through a different lens than other issues with regard to surface &quot;originality.&quot; Seated stuff circulated for decades, into the Barber era and beyond, doing the nation&#039;s work. It could change hands, and conditions, multiple times a day. And its&#039; circulating lifetime was spent in many cases in atmospheres we&#039;d consider to foul to live in today. Sulfuric atmospheres, from the unfiltered burning of so much coal to power industry.</p><p><br /></p><p>A coin could tone black pretty quickly in those days. Maybe some enterprising kid with a scrap of emery cloth wiped it off back in 1879, and then it circulated for fifty more years. If it was cleaned ~150 years ago, it deserves to be considered more &quot;contemporary charm&quot; than &quot;scarlet letter.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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