Featured In today's cash drawer

Hello Ranger,
I understand that dateless Buffalo nickels can be sold for a premium over 5¢ each to people making belt buckles & other jewelry.
J.T.

 

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Cool beans - good idea!!

 

Wizard Coin supply is a resource.

 

There have been more than a few threads here about date restoration. Something about the striking process for nickels makes it work really well on them, more so than on coins made from other metals.

Any date-restoration process is going to result in an ungradeable "details" coin. It damages, corrodes, the surface. But a dateless Buffalo nickel has already lost any numismatic premium, so in a sense "there's nothing to lose". (Maybe someday there'll be a way to use X-ray diffraction to read a hidden date out of sub-surface microstructure without damaging the coin -- maybe.)

One drawback of Nic-a-date is that it leaves a stained spot on the coin where you apply it, and that spot looks different from the rest of the coin. Some people instead soak the whole coin in acid; white vinegar is quite effective. Do it that way, and you're still trashing the coin's surface, but it will look better, with a uniform texture and with detail restored all over the coin, including mint mark, horn, tail, and feathers.

A key-date Buffalo with a restored date can still pull a premium on a site like eBay. I believe TPGs will still slab them, although I'm not sure that will always be the case, and they'll only be slabbed as Details coins. Look for ones with mint marks; as I recall, the only significant key Philadelphia Buffalo nickel is the 1916/16 overdate, and those are very scarce. The odds that you'll find one are tiny. But if you're just chucking a dozen nickels at a time into a (glass or ceramic or plastic) bowl of vinegar, the overhead is low. It takes a few hours to a day or more to bring up detail. Leave them in too long, and you'll dissolve away too much nickel, leaving a shrunken copper-colored slug.

My personal take is that a vinegar soak produces a more appealing result, doesn't stain, and is a LOT cheaper than Nic-a-date. It's also useful for household cleaning.

 

Some people throw in some hydrogen peroxide too. I've never tried it.

 

You can get ferric chloride (same stuff) a lot cheaper at an electronics supply store. It's used to etch copper off of circuit boards.

 

I found it wasn't necessary. Throwing in salt will accelerate things, too, but makes it a lot easier to trash the coins. I prefer the slow action of plain white vinegar.

Edit: I think someone here found that vinegar plus peroxide would etch silver, and seemed to restore dates on dateless SLQs. He thought he'd found a 1923-S that way, but when he submitted it to ICG, they wouldn't slab it even as a details coin.

 

With out reading every post this can happen a few ways. Stolen is possible but not likely if they were picked up at a bank. If they were stolen the person that stole them wouldn't go to a bank to cash them in. They could then have come from a safety deposit box after someone died and the family cashed out. They could have been found by a family member after some died and brought to the bank to cash out. Whoever brought them to the bank to cash out didn't know what they had. This happens more often than you would think.

 

hey KeviniswhoIam you know im...im not jealous at all....i mean because i opened my cash drawer the other day to and found better stuff so im good....im good.

 

Thanks to all that gave information to restore the date to Buffalo Nickels. It does, however, tell me that "darned if you do and darned if you don't. I think I will try one with the "white vinegar" first, to see how well it does. If I can read the date, I will try it on another coin. If it works with the second coin, I will keep doing it until I'm tired or it's not working anymore, for whatever reason. Can I use the same white vinegar that I used on the first coin?

 

It eventually loses strength. Also, it gets loaded up with nickel acetate, which is somewhat toxic; flush it down the toilet so it gets diluted. (DO NOT cook with the leftovers.) If you find yourself doing this for many thousands of nickels, it might be neighborly to look for hazardous-waste disposal options.

 

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As to those buffalo nickels, about 60 plus years ago, I was a teen just getting into coin collecting and buffalo nickels were plentiful in change. Many had the date worn off and back then the deal for a kid was to soak them in plain vinegar for a few days and the date would sometimes come through. The vinegar would give the coin a rough look but if I was just going to pass them in change at 5cents anyway, it would be a bit of fun to find some date I didn’t have in my Whitman folder. Some dates would ‘raise’ very easily after a day or so, others not so. Sometimes a date would be there with the coin ‘wet’ but once the coin dried, the date would disappear, other times the date stayed visible. Oh, and back then one could find a 1913 Type 1 “raised mound” without doing the vinegar thing.

 

I think it's more fun just to spend them. It puts them back in circulation and may be some kid will get it and get hooked.

 

Valentines Day candy that is on it's 4th markdown was 10 cents. I think everything was 90% off

 

wow OP, that is a nice find

 

I thought so too! Grading doesnt look horrible for circulated dimes......