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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Plumbata, post: 4214365, member: 96864&quot;]Ah, far superior pictures and indeed better than my own abilities would permit even if I hadn&#039;t left my camera 1000 miles away!</p><p><br /></p><p>As suspected, your coin is unfortunately too environmentally corroded/eroded to be worth any further efforts.&nbsp; Maybe some crud in the recesses around the face could be removed, like in the eye and chin/neck area, but sadly most original surface metal has been eroded and the rough dirty looking surfaces you see are only thinly patinated without anything more below.</p><p><br /></p><p>Not sure if you want to see examples of good dirty coins I&#039;ve bought to clean up but I&#039;ve noticed that most collectors, myself included, have faced significant challenges and disappointment when dabbling with &quot;unsearched uncleaned&quot; batches and often wash their hands of the whole idea before learning how to look for truly high quality but dirty (and hopefully unrecognized by competition) coins for bargain prices. I started with andres pencils but they are awful for cleaning coins, like using a meat cleaver to perform what should be laparoscopic microsurgery. They&#039;re ok for larger and less detailed items than coins but really should be avoided in my opinion. My world changed when I got a cheap 20x binocular microscope and some diamond dusted pin tool tips and the pen sized clamp to hold the cleaning tips. Then I discovered that using my wife&#039;s sewing pins allowed even finer and more agile cleaning, and they can be sharpened (or faceted, dulled, whatever the detail that needs cleaning requires) with a honing stone or fine grit sandpaper very quickly. I also made and use copper tools made from scrap wire of decent gauge cut to 5-7 inches with each tip hammered into a square/diamond cross section, then sharpened as fine as possible with a stone, care taken to preserve the 4 sharp 90 degree edges leading to the point. Soft copper tools require very frequent resharpening but are excellent for AE coins with a soft or fragile patina requiring something tougher than wood or bamboo, and also for cleaning silver coins which are soft and delicate and usually shouldn&#039;t be cleaned with much at all let alone metal implements but when called for the copper wire tools are often just hard enough to bust through an offending tumor of crud that wood can&#039;t while being much more forgiving than other harder metal tools. Frequent sharpening is not ideal but especially for bronzes, the tool being soft enough to wear down and leave streaks of copper on the surface instead of scratching through the patina and damaging the coin is a very forgiving warning system letting you know to adjust pressure/direction of cleaning before causing injury. Not sure if you&#039;re interested but I don&#039;t recall reading about anyone arriving upon sewing pins and copper wire as preferred tools so it might be useful to keep in mind if you want to go deeper into ancient coin cleaning.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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