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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 3010624, member: 112"]For those who still think that dipping coins is: a mistake, a bad idea, harmful to the coin, or just plain wrong - allow me to offer a couple of scenarios. You own a rather common coin based on date/mint, it's been graded and slabbed as MS63 and is worth $200-$300 as a general rule, and it has heavy, quite dark toning. You take that coin to somebody who knows what they are doing and they dip the coin for you - it comes out beautifully ! Yeah it's blast white but it has gorgeous luster, barley a mark to be seen, so you resubmit it for grading. It comes back MS65 and is now worth $700-$800. Is that a bad thing ? Or a good thing ? Same scenario, only this time with a scarce maybe even rare coin. This one recently sold for $56,000. You owned it, you sold it. But the new owner is a dealer who knows what he is doing when dipping coins. So he dips the coin, and it comes out beautifully. He resubmits the coin, it's upgraded 2 MS grades and he puts it back on the market immediately. Bear in mind this is less than 3 months after you sold the coin. It sells of course, this time for $126,000. Is that a bad thing, or a good thing ? Kinda depends on who's answering doesn't it - you, or the dealer who bought it. Here's the thing, both of these scenarios have actually occurred. The first, more times than you can count and with coins worth up to and including 5 figures, and it continues to happen on a daily basis. The second, less often of course but enough times that it's pretty well known. There's also a 3rd scenario that has played out many times, it goes kind of like this. You have always been against the idea of dipping coins and typically only buy those coins you believe to be original, most of them with heavy dark toning at least around the outer edges but also more of the coin and in some cases the entire coin. You keep these coins for years, decades, never allowing them to be dipped. But eventually you sell them, as is, and the new owner decides to dip them. But when does he is sadly disappointed. The coins are dipped correctly, every single one, but only a few turn out well - those you had owned the least amount of time. With the rest, the advanced toning had already done its damage, the luster on the coin had already been destroyed and the coins were now worth but a fraction of what he paid for them. But if you had dipped those coins 10 years ago, 20 years ago - this would not have been the case. Some if not most of the luster would still be there then. And the life of those coins would have been prolonged, and greatly so. And today they would be worth multiples of what they are now, maybe many multiples. You see toning, when it is allowed to progress unchecked and not removed, is destructive. This is a fact, an absolute and undeniable fact. It's simple chemistry and physics. Yeah it's fine, even very desirable, in its earlier and even middle stages. But once it progresses beyond a certain point - it's already too late. Your goal was to preserve the coins by leaving them as they are - in your eyes original. But by doing what you did you have destroyed them, condemned them to a certain death. Call it the law of unintended consequences if you like, you had good intentions after all. You just didn't realize that there comes a point that in order to preserve the coin, to prolong its life, toning must be carefully and correctly removed. I believe it could be argued that over the years toning has probably destroyed more coins than even all the centuries of harsh cleaning by ignorant and uneducated collectors. And all of them could have been saved had only they known. As matter of fact, the vast majority of all the nice coins you know of - the only reason you know of them is because they were saved - by dipping.[/QUOTE]

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