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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 1687711, member: 26430&quot;]Not sure i agree completely, but HA brings up an inte[HR][/HR]resting issue. When it comes to tooling, it&#039;s easy to recognize wholesale sculpting of legends from nothing as being way outside the generally accepted boundaries of good faith, honest, and preservation-minded restoration. </p><p><br /></p><p>The extremes of acceptable and unacceptable are easily recognized, but there are clearly gray areas. When cleaning a coin one tries to dig crud from between characters in the legend. It&#039;s easy enough to discover you&#039;ve used a tool too hard for the surface and etched an edge onto a letter. Or, one decides which areas to leave natural dirt and patina in and which areas to remove it from, hoping to enhance some details. After picking at and pressing on the features long enough, with the wrong tools, it&#039;s quite feasible to slightly reshape finer details. </p><p><br /></p><p>That&#039;s a far cry from some examples mentioned, but I notice constantly when cleaning coins that i could be moving in a direction that might border on tooling. I don&#039;t intend to tool (or even know how it&#039;s done intentionally), but I think we have to accept that both restoration and tooling techniques are on a continuum and that both share the same end of improving appearance and/or value (of course, restoration is often motivated by other concerns, such s preservation, but I&#039;m acutely aware of the overlap every time I pull out the picks and needles).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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