Not Quite Sure What I've Found...

You want to get pure acetone (not nail polish remover) from the hardware store.

There is very little chance that you've found a real treasure .... but you never know. So it's best to be careful and stick with the pure acetone.

You pour some acetone into a little glass container and let it soak for 20 minutes or so then remove it and repeat as often as necessary.

We will, of course, want pics of whatever it is that you found.

Good luck. I hope it's something really cool!

Thanks for the help. I'm actually posting from Woodstock... small world, isn't it?... but I'm only in town a couple of times a month.

Did you want mobile-phone pics of it's current state?

My plan is to follow your advice about soaking it in acetone, then take it to the Imaging department here on base and have them shoot it under low-angle point-source illumination in a darkened room in order to accent the surface relief. If they shoot it four times (moving the light source 90 degrees around between shots) and photo-shop the four images together into one, it should give us as much info as we're ever going to get.

I don't expect that I'll find anythng valuable, but a hundred-year-old penny would be a pretty neat find.

That sounds neat, maybe it would spark an interest in numismatics (that means a money studier).

You can do that fancy stuff when you get back to Oromocto but cell phone pics would do wonders as far as for us to give you advice.
If it does spark an interest I could probably find you an old large cent you could take off my hands for me.

Oh, no tap water. Distilled. The stuff in the water could hurt the coin.

It is either a Canadian small cent struck between '20 to 36 or a Newfoundland small cent. I can make out the bust of King George V with a crown on the obverse but the obverse is to toasty.

It is worth a cent regardless, can't be upset about finding a coin, beats a kick in the butt.

I'll be happy to have found a '20 - '36 penny, if that's what it is. Oddly enough, I had just now come to that same conclusion, after Googling "Canadian penny history" and looking at a few images.

Thanks for the help!

I'll probably be back... you seem a friendly bunch. Just for interest's sake, I'll clean that penny this weekend and talk to an imaging tech on Sunday... she's driving me back to Oromocto!

I'd keep that as an item found. Usually people that find coins consider a found one good luck.

Already on it SPP! If you want an old rusty train spike or a crushed beer can I'll trade ya for some McPuffin dollars.

Actually I found a '78 cent last weekend on the tracks, first coin find with the new bounty hunter.