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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Plumbata, post: 3584932, member: 96864&quot;]Cleaning ancient coins is exceptionally fun and rewarding personally and I&#039;d highly recommend expanding your experience and repertoire of chemical and mechanical techniques. Using a 20x binocular microscope has opened my eyes to what is possible and is of paramount importance if you want to clean coins well. It&#039;s taken some trial and error plus lots of hands-on experience so while there is still much to be learned I&#039;m now pretty good at spotting which cheap cruddy looking coins can be cleaned to reveal great pieces with good surfaces underneath the deposits (thus greatly enhancing value) and which ones to avoid because of telltale signs indicating that the patina and surfaces are a lost cause. For chemical treatments you should start with cheap modern silver and copper alloy coins to get a feel for what to expect before applying the same treatments to special medieval and ancient coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>For example, in my opinion [USER=76194]@Sallent[/USER] &#039;s 1st Roman coin could easily be cleaned with both value and visual appeal significantly improved as the patina is irregular and superficial and the exposed silver appears relatively solid, smooth and uncrystallized which would be the same for the surfaces under the crud, whereas the 2 nice Sicilian litrae are as good as they can be as-is because the removal of their thick sulfide patinas would strip detail and reveal unattractive and unnatural frosted surfaces. Learned that the hard way with an inexpensive black ancient coin, but to get good at making omelettes one usually has to break a few eggs.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s largely a matter of personal differences, inclinations and abilities but the fact is that basically every ancient coin has been cleaned so I wanted to learn how to do it myself and make the coin budget stretch a bit further. Spending a few hours handling and cleaning a coin, studying every tiny detail under 20x magnification is an extremely intimate and personal way to experience a coin and make it one&#039;s own. And when you&#039;ve taken an unrecognizable or obscured slug and revealed a lovely high-grade gem the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment is sublime, it&#039;s almost as though you participated in the very creation of the piece.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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