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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;sand, post: 8184425, member: 118540&quot;]I partially agree. I don&#039;t know, if the scratches reach the level of tooling. Maybe they do. Maybe they don&#039;t. Perhaps it depends, on one&#039;s definition of tooling. I&#039;ve only been collecting ancients for 3 years, so I&#039;m no expert.</p><p>The last high resolution photo in the OP, seems to show a lot of scratches, which are parallel to the edges of the legend/letters, and in between the letters. If someone was looking at that photo, someone who didn&#039;t know what was done to the coin, someone who is not an expert, then that person wouldn&#039;t know if the coin had been tooled and then re-patinated with an artificial patina, or if only the patina had been scratched. Perhaps an expert could tell, if the expert had the coin in hand, under a microscope or loupe.</p><p>Even if none of the base metal is removed, if the patina is selectively removed from the fields, and a similar amount of patina is not removed from the devices, then perhaps this could be called tooling, if it is extreme enough, depending on one&#039;s definition of tooling. If the patina is thick enough, then one could carve an entire design out of the patina, a design which is nothing like the original design, and that would be tooling, obviously.</p><p>However, it looks like [USER=89213]@Inspector43[/USER] was trying to reveal the actual underlying design. And, it looks like [USER=89213]@Inspector43[/USER] removed patina, from both the devices and the fields.</p><p>But, for such a thick patina, how does one know, where the edges of the devices are? And, how does one know, what the details of the devices are? How does one know, if one is correctly revealing the edges and details of the devices? How does one know, how much patina to remove, at each location on the coin?</p><p>In any case, cleaning marks/scratches are undesirable. Occasionally, I will see an ancient coin in an auction, in which &quot;cleaning marks&quot; is mentioned in the description in the listing, because the coin has a lot of scratches on it, which were created by the cleaning process that someone used.</p><p>However, I don&#039;t know, what professionals do, when they start with a coin, like the OP coin was originally, with a thick layer of blue/black patina, so thick that the design is almost completely hidden. It seems like, it would be desirable, to remove some of the blue/black patina, like [USER=89213]@Inspector43[/USER] did, so that the underlying devices are revealed. But, one wouldn&#039;t want to remove all of the blue/black patina, because then one would have a stripped red coin.</p><p>But, how does a professional do it? Do they essentially do what [USER=89213]@Inspector43[/USER] did, and then use a tiny buffing wheel to smooth out the cleaning scratches? Or, do they use a different tool, to scrape off the patina, a tool which doesn&#039;t leave cleaning scratches? Or, do they use a chemical treatment, rather than a mechanical process? I don&#039;t know.</p><p>And, how do they know, that they are revealing the actual details and edges of the underlying devices, versus creating edges and details that don&#039;t actually exist in the underlying metal?</p><p>Does anyone know the answers, to these questions?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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