Will a full red copper coin turn into a RB 10 yrs from now?

I've always put the little packs that usually come in medicine bottles that absorb moisture in all my safes and I have never noticed any of my coins toning or turning colors.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I guess there's also an element of stealth there too. I imagine a wine cooler would work also.

 

I would be worried about condensation as well. Water is never good to put on the surface of a coin. Everything bad that can happen to a coin gets accelerated with water.

 

It doesn't matter if the slab is air tight or not. The plastic that the slab is made of is semi-permeable to many chemicals. they pass right through the plastic itself. Sulfur is one of them. I have slabs coins that were 100% red as made and they have toned to a deep orange over the years (some even darker!) even though they were kept in humidity controlled areas and protected well against chemical contamination. I would never, personally pay a premium for an original red coin that hasn't a "skin" of some kind of toning on it.

 

most important is your ambient air composition. ozone,(0-3) and sulfur compounds are big offenders.

when i was a kid i used to strip problem wheats with ketchup and retone them with PURE oxygen, which produced an absolutely undetectably natural brown in just a few minutes.

i have a wayte-raymond cent album pages from '34 to '60 that have plastic slide covers and the coins were clearly full red gems when inserted. (i'll post a shot when i get it together.) anyway, they have incredible iridescent toning that could in no way be considered either red or brown. they're just stunning and many are flawless. (i believe they should remain in their album home of 80 years. i don't want to touch them.) does anyone know whether it's the plastic or the cardboard that contributes to the characteristic toning these albums produce? i scored them on ebay 15 years ago and don't know where they spent their time before that. the toning takes a long time, though, since some of the later ones ('50's) are still nearly full red.

2x2s work best to prevent toning for all coins. i have a '60 proof cent that's been in a 2x2 for 54 years and looks like it was minted yesterday.

Derry

 

Does anyone here think something like the mosquito preserved in Jurassic Park amber could work for coins? Obviously the amber-like substance could not touch the coin directly. Instead have the coin in a slab and then preserve the entire thing.

 

Probably the only way to make the color change infinitely slow would be to put the coin in a glass chamber filled with something like pure argon or helium. It also wouldn't hurt to cool it down close to 0 Kelvin since I believe the reactions in question are less thermodynamically favorable at low temperatures.

 

Lacquer the coin. It worked for collectors 150 years ago in their sulfur-laden atmosphere, and it'll work today. And acetone removes lacquer without a trace. Good excuse to lose the slab anyway.

 

I prefer storing them in a mayonaise jar on Funk and Waggnals porch.