how to?

gene2393

how can you tone a coin with out waiting a long time?

SilverEagles92

Artificially, and it ruins the coin. Never try to tone a coin under and circumstances. Just buy one that has naturally toned over a long period of time.

lordmarcovan

The above post is sound advice if you are dealing with nondug collector coins. However, since dug coins often must be cleaned and therefore often are in need of some retoning, it's not quite the taboo with dug coins that it is with other coins. (Still, if the coin is potentially valuable you probably shouldn't mess with it).

For copper coins, I use a paste of Vaseline and powdered sulfur. Sulfur is an ingredient that can tone silver as well, but I generally see no need to retone my silver- I just let it do that naturally. Gold coins should not need retoning, and shouldn't be messed with anyway since they are valuable.

So really I recommend the sulfur and Vaseline paste only for copper and bronze coins.

When I dug this coin, it was covered in granular, greenish-brown concretion. I carefully removed the worst of the concretion by soaking the coin in Worcestershire sauce (ketchup works too, because it is mildly acidic, and toilet bowl cleaner is even more acidic but more risky). Then I scrubbed it using fine steel wool (I later discovered a toothbrush-sized brass wire brush with fine bristles, made for cleaning electrical contacts). Now, using steel wool or wire brushes on an old coin sounds crazy, and under normal circumstances it is- but I made sure I was using extra fine steel wool, and I only was scrubbing at the cruddy coating rather than the coin itself, for the most part. When the coin started showing bright copper on the high points, I backed off. It came out pretty well. But afterwards, I was left with a coin that had unnaturally orange spots where the crud had been removed. Presto! A little Vaseline-sulfur paste worked like a charm, and the coin was instantly brown again. In fact, to look at it now, you'd never know it had gone through all that ordeal.

Here is the "after" picture.



Cleaning Copper Coins Without Affecting Their Color (an eBay Guide I wrote)