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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;gsimonel, post: 3585295, member: 82549&quot;]I love my ancient coin collection--the history, the beauty, the challenge of tracking down certain coins--but the reality is that they are just old lumps of metal. No one dies or starves to death if I ruin an ancient coin. </p><p><br /></p><p>In most cases, the few coins I&#039;ve ruined were already in terrible shape, but they ended up losing detail after I subjected them to electrolysis--perhaps a dozen or so coins out of the hundreds whose appearance improved by the same process.</p><p><br /></p><p>There was one nicer, silver coin that ended up looking worse after treatment, though, which I regret. It was an unidentifiable, thick, black slug when I received it in a lot of uncleaned coins. I had no idea it was silver. It did not respond to any of the less-harsh cleaning methods that I tried, so I subjected it to electrolysis and discovered a scarce denarius of Vespasian. There was a lot of good detail, but its appearance was marred by dark, patchy black stains left by the encrustation. I&nbsp; wanted to lighten or remove the stains if possible. This was many years ago, when I was still somewhat new at the hobby and hadn&#039;t had any experience cleaning silver coins. I was told it was safe to use lemon juice on Vespasian-era silver, so I let it soak overnight. Turns out it was a provincial coin of lower-quality silver. The coin came out cleaner but with a lot of porosity, and it retrospect it probably would have looked better had I left the black patches on it. </p><p><br /></p><p>Here then is my true confession:</p><p><img src="http://feltemp.com/Images/GoldenAge/Vespasian.JPG" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><u>Vespasian</u></p><p><i>Augustus, A.D. 69-79</i></p><p>Provincial Silver Denarius</p><p>Phillipi mint, A.D. 69-70</p><p>Obv: IMP CAES VESPAS AVG</p><p>Rev: PACI OPB TERR AVG - Turretted female bust</p><p>Φ behind bust</p><p>RIC (New) 1407</p><p>18mm, 2.8g.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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