Do any dealers have any cleaned coin horror stories?

TheLiberator

For instance: a little old lady who cleaned her dead husband's collection after he passed reducing its value by thousands?

Come on, I know you guys have em'!

Let em' rip!

njcoincrank

My ex-wife's father and a friend of his were metal-detecting. They found a bunch of gold coins including some $20 Liberty pieces. They took them home and my ex-mother in law to be cleaned them with toothpaste and a toothbrush. Then they devided them up. Seems the friend got an 1870-CC twenty in the deal.

This all happened many years before I began my sentence, and I never got to see the coins.

njcoincrank

Geoman

I am not a dealer, and this is a smaller amount than thousands, but I haven't told it yet. My brother-in-law many years back was collecting Lincoln Wheats. But they were all "dirty" and not shinny. So to clean them up, he put them in socks, tied the socks shut, and washed them in the washing machine. They did come out bight and shinny, with the half gallon of bleach he used!

TheLiberator

<< <i>I am not a dealer, and this is a smaller amount than thousands, but I haven't told it yet. My brother-in-law many years back was collecting Lincoln Wheats. But they were all "dirty" and not shinny. So to clean them up, he put them in socks, tied the socks shut, and washed them in the washing machine. They did come out bight and shinny, with the half gallon of bleach he used! >>



WOW! That one is good! I bet Lincoln had that "whiter than white" smile after that roll in the suds!

Hmm... that gives me an idea: maybe I need to put my icon in the washer with some bleach too!

Aethelred

Once a man brought about 20 Large Cents into our shop and wanted to know what they were worth. He had cleaned each with an eraser! His error cost him several hundred dollars!

Another time an older lady brought in several silver dollars she was interested in selling. I looked at them and made her an offer which she said she would think about. Several days later she came back in and showed us the coins again asking "what are they worth now?" Each had been polished with Braso or something like it! When I told here what her coins were now worth she got mad at me!

ibzman350

<< <i>Hmm... that gives me an idea: maybe I need to put my icon in the washer with some bleach too! >>



only need to do the teeth

Tonelover

Happens just about every time someone brings in their "estate". Now if they had actually NOT cleaned their coins, then I'd have something truly newsworthy to report.

TheLiberator

<< <i>Happens just about every time someone brings in their "estate". Now if they had actually NOT cleaned their coins, then I'd have something truly newsworthy to report. >>



Hmm..it is still that common huh? What a shame! It's like on Antiques Roadhsow where someone has a piece of colonial furniture that they stripped and then they get told it would have been worth 250,000. You can just see the pain in their faces... Ouch!

Goldfinger

My father told me that when he was a kid, he and his friends used to clean coins with mercury. Just a drop on the coin, pushed around with a toothpick, being careful not to let it come in contact with their skin. He claims the coins gleamed after the mercury treatment, and I'm sure they did. But don't try it at home.

Gandyjai

I had heard that a sonic jewelry cleaner would remove PVC from a coin. I had a 71-D Ike.....hopefully MS66, that
had just a touch of PVC I wanted to try it on. I meant to leave it in for only 5 mins or so, but got busy, then fell asleep!
It ran all night and needless to say, the PVC was gone, but so was every bit of luster!....I haven't used it since

Gandyjai

mrcommem

I am not a dealer but a pharmacist. I see a lot of people and they know I am an advanced collector so they sometimes bring coins in for me to evaluate. A lady brought in her husband hoard of half dollars, mostly walkers, washington quarters, mercury dimes and various other silver coins. To my amazement almost every coin had been brightened and scratched with silver polish. I felt so bad for her when I had to tell her they were worth just about scrap. I have seen this over and over again. Please, don't clean your coins!!!!

lordmarcovan

I heard a story about somebody bringing in an AU-UNC 1794 dollar to a coin shop. He'd Tarn-X'ed it a few minutes before he came in, so it would be "nice and shiny" for the dealer. Cost himself thousands.

Oh, yeah- then there's the story of my first detector-found large cent. I was out detecting on the site of a Revolutionary War-era shipyard. First I found what I thought was a large cent, but turned out to be a big copper 18th century coat button. Then I got another signal near there and thought it was another button, but it was indeed a large cent- my first. I was thrilled to see some details beneath the grime, which revealed Liberty's hair bow and some features of the wreath, and enough to tell me it was a Draped Bust cent (1796-1807). So I took it home and put it in my homemade electrolysis rig to get the crud off. (Electrolysis had worked well for me in the past on dug silver). Trouble is, I apparently left the large cent in the electrolysis bath too long, or it was just too corroded and unstable anyway. It came out a completely featureless, pitted brown slug. The electrical current just "burned it up".

Granted, most dug coins have to be cleaned as a matter of necessity, and this one, having been buried for 200 years, was already corroded and grungy, but if I had used a fine wire brush to clean it instead of the electrolysis, I might have been able to make out the date. Now I'll never know. Since then I have only found one other large cent, an 1837, and I learned my lesson. Though it came up crusty and greenish, I used the fine brass wire brush to clean it, then retoned it with some sulfur and Vaseline, and aside from a few small pits, this one isn't that bad looking.

The toothpaste-and-toothbrush story on the gold coins in the second post of this thread is not that horrifying to me. I've used toothpaste (and baking soda) on dug silver. Electrolysis or dipping may have been better on the gold, but sometimes you need something to get the stubborn crud off. (Mind you, I am only referring to grungy dug stuff!)