Hiding Coins?

good thing I havnt tried lemon juice, what should I use?

ill look into a safety deposit box when the house sells, since its not a lot of coins (12 in total) I might just carry them in my pocket during the move like I did when I just came back from new york

if you get a small box of rice, you could hide them in that and the rice will keep the moisture out as well.

That's not a good hiding spot, I can see three of them from here.

But seriously, those three coins don't need cleaning. They look fine just the way they are; cleaning them will almost certainly make them look worse.

The 2 top ones are good and the pics do not do the toning on them justice. People charge and pay a slight premium over market value for toned coins such as these so I would leave them be.

wow, so the worse looking they are the better they are to collectors? I have one that still has a lot of its luster to it, I have yet to see a mint silver quarter and I dont think id be able to see the difference between a shiny silver and a shiny new one, only feel and hear the difference.....and of course not see the band of copper

Agent Mulder, think of cleaning coins the way you would think of owning a Meet the Beatles vinyl record (bear with me, this metaphor totally makes sense):


Your record should be stored away from light, heat, and moisture to keep it unwarped and sounding great. But over 20 years or so your kid tries to show off your phonograph and nicks the record; it gets set on a table and a drinks coaster is placed on top of it; some ignoramus puts your albums back in the cabinet sideways, and the edge gets a teensy bit bent. 20 years later, you have a record that sounds kinda scratchy and has to be turned off manually before the needle winds down, because there's a chip in the vinyl. You can still get collectors to pay a good chunk of money for your copy of Meet the Beatles, because it's a very rare album and all the songs still play (and expert audiophiles will tell you that even a slightly scritchy record has better sound quality than a shiny new digitally remastered mp3), but you could get a larger chunk of money if the songs all played without those blips and scritches.

Now a new wonder-product, E-Z Record, is on the market, and it claims to fill in all those little nicks and microscopic warps! It can't do anything for the bent edge, but boy-howdy, you're going to have a record that plays just like it did back in the good old days. Except--you don't. Because what E-Z Record actually does is to "level out" the nicks using a mild acid, so now instead of having little old-timey scritches, you have blank space akin to the "bleeps" on modern radio--and damage to portions of the record you weren't trying to fix is inevitable. Is any collector going to buy your copy of Meet the Beatles now? Well, maybe, but probably not. Who wants to listen to "So pl____ say to ___ you'll l____e be y___ man" instead of "so please, say to me you'll let me be your man" with a couple of scritches in it?


Cleaning a coin is exactly like using the hypothetical E-Z Record: you're going to take off flaws that some collectors would find charming and pay extra for, and in the process you will also destroy vital, unflawed portions. Nobody who has any serious interest in your coin (or record) will now purchase it, because the damage renders your coin (or record) useless in terms of value. Are there ways to "improve" the coin's appearance that won't devalue it? Sure there are, just like there are ways to take fingerprints off your metaphorical copy of Meet the Beatles without rendering it unplayable. But just like you'd ask someone who knows their way around vinyl how to do that (and possibly if you can pay them to do it for you), you should ask an expert how to conserve your coins (and if they need any conservation at all), and possibly to teach you how to do it.