Ancient Coin Cleaning And Questions

The key thing is to have patience: Gringotts et al offer quicker solutions, but they dont alway work out so well. Personally, I'd stick to distilled water or olive oil (oil is messier, but, as said, quicker). The oil's mechanism of cleaning is quicker due to a slight acidity. The mineral leeching that DW does is quite useful - often, coins are received with bronze disease which corrodes the coin rapidly and eventually will wholly destroy it - the way to treat this is to use DW soaks to leech out the chloride ions that cause the disease (of course, changing the water regularly). Coins with BD should be quarantined from unafflicted coins.

The final picture appears to be a quite interesting coin - I suspect it might be a provincial issue showing a dolphin. Coins in such condition are hard to clean - I suggest you utilise oil for that one (along with the aforementioned patience - id start by giving it a short bath, about a week, followed by a good brush, then a longer term soak on the order of months with the occaisonal checkup and brush to check its progess. If you're lucky, the green will melt away very quickly, but I doubt much detail will be left on this one - if you're unlucky, the surface might be too fragile and and melt away too, leaving nothing behind it).

The purer the oil the better.

just pile 'em all in...but it doesn't really matter. let them soak for a bit (days, weeks, months..up to you). if the water starts to look gunky i'd change it out however.

Hello guys, a 12 hour soak in DW gave me good results. 5 coins where I can see a bust and a design

That provincial coin Ben mentioned did fine, some of the green was gone.

Now i'll do a 24 hour soak and see what will happen

I got pics of the coins and the updates in hopes someone can at least identify the ruler.

Pics will be up soon.

Looks like you're going to end up with some nice coins. Are you using a brush? (if not, the best thing to use is a cheap toothbrush with the bristles trimmed short.)

I wont speculate on the IDs yet (thats half the fun, after all), but you should able to start pinning down some of the reverses from here using Tesorillo.

I'll grab pics after I clean them with the toothbrush before the next soak tomorrow morning. They are coming out better than I thought too.

2 day soak