Uh oh! I cleaned a popular coin!

Decided to try and work on this Tiberius tribute penny, since to me it looked like it had a chance at looking decent with probably good details underneath. Seems like my gamble paid off. Started with water and soap for day 1, then moved to lemon juice and picking off chunks/rubbing off dirt for a few days, then lastly I used an annomia-water mix which really did a number on the gunk, which up to that point was mostly gone on the obverse but mostly still stubbornly there on the reverse. Overnight of the ammonia-water and some cotton swab rubbing got the denarius to where it is at now. It has a couple of spots of gunk left that I want to take care of so I will put it back into the mix soon.





Please post any coins you've cleaned, any coin cleaning stories, and/or your Tiberius coins!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Great job! That is a very nice tribute penny.

 

Household ammonia and water should always be used on coins before lemon juice, rubbing the coin, etc. As good as it looks, the coin would have looked better if you had simply stuck to household ammonia and water. Lemon juice causes pitting often. I don't know why so many of you are always keen on starting with the acids first, when household ammonia is so readily available and safe to use.

The only time ammonia should not be used is on Potin coins.

 

Damn. That's an impressive cleaning job.

 

Looks good to me. Nice job!

 

Any chance you could elaborate? Better in what way? I'm not any sort of chemist but I figure if lemon juice doesn't harm silver then it wouldn't seem like an issue to use on a denarius. If anything it probably might have just set me back a bit in time spent on cleaning it.

 

That came out well, nice job. I would'nt have chanced it with that type of expensive coin.

 

Wow, that's a tremendous cleaning result! Really nice job, vk.

 

Someone is being a negative Nancy. It looks awesome. I imaging most of the corrosion probably already existed due to the soil. This turned out better than I would have imagined. Great job.

 

I wouldn't have dared, but it looks great!

 

WOW!! Great job VK !! It's hard to believe it's the same coin

 

Yes, I'm being a negative Nancy alright. Truth be told, he did a good job, but lemon juice will eat into the silver after prolonged exposure. Ammonia and water is much gentñer and should always be tried first. And when using lemon juice, never forget to neutralize the acid after you pull the coin out.

 

Looks great!

 

I don't think he did anything wrong going straight to lemon juice once the dirt was removed. Lemon juice is the only thing that was going to remove some of that (well, not the only thing, but probably the only one easily available). The roughness was already there, removing the top layer of gunk just brought it into the open.

 

I only had it in for 4 days, 3 I had it mixed with distilled water. And it did not spend that whole time immersed.

I feel like I still need to see examples of denarii or other solid silver coins damaged by lemon juice to be convinced. Like iamtiberius and red_spork it looks like the porosity was already present, most likely from the conditions in which it was buried. I have never heard of lemon juice being harmful to use on solid silver. If anything, I think the ammonia might have affected my coin more; after dunking it, the obverse came out slightly darker. I figure since (again, not a chemist), ammonia seems like the stronger stuff.

Also, I only remembered later on about the ammonia, so I probably would have used it earlier (I don't have much experience cleaning silver so I was still figuring out while cleaning my coin on how to more efficiently clean it - I admit I could have researched a bit more on how to clean it before I started, guess I was still focused on my very successful cleaning of my Louis the Pious denier with lemon juice a while back).

 

I'm not really an ancients guy but I'm very impressed at your restoration/conservation work there.

 

My cleaning skills are not very good at all. I did try out with an eastern denarius of Septimius Severus some years back. It was sold to me as a limes but I suspected and confirmed it to be silver.

Start....

Part way through... still there were still deep red adhesions

I stopped at this point....


I also used diluted lemon juice and a wooden pick. I did neutralise at the end of the soaks.

Martin

 

Looks great @ValiantKnight good job.

 

Based on my recollection of chemistry, as well as research on the Internet, it appears that lemon juice will have little if any corrosive effect on pure silver.

Lemon juice's acidity is due to its citric acid content. Citric acid is present in lemon juice in a very low percentage -- too low to create any chemical reaction with pure silver. From what I could find online, even prolonged exposure of silver to low-acidity lemon juice will not cause the silver to corrode.

The citric acid will help dissolve other deposits on the coin, and maybe that's why coins treated with lemon juice can end up looking pitted. But in these cases, the pitting was probably underneath the deposits to begin with, and thus it's a question of whether you want a clean but pitted coin, or a deposit-laden but non-pitted coin.

The OP's result looks (literally) wonderful, as in: I'm full of wonder about how the result could possibly look that good with such a mild and simple cleaning regimen. In my opinion, even though the uncleaned coin was of a desirable type, it was well worth the risk of damage to improve it.

Very, very well done!

 

Great job, VK!