1885 Morgan Dollar- ANACS MS-64

If the underlying luster is good and the surfaces are nice, given that you only paid $45 for it, I might consider it a crack and dip candidate for my album, but that's just me. A 63-64 just has no place in my sets, only in my albums. :)

To each their own, I figured you were probably a YN, and I noticed you doing the same thing as I when I started out in this hobby. Focusing on bargains... I learned the hard way about the downsides of that strategy.

This is easy, then. It *might* be construed as a mistake, but you're not going to lose a penny on it. Now, for punishment: you gotta VAM it.

I will take a 64 with superior eye appeal over a 65, but most of my Morgans in my year set are 65 or better, with decent eye appeal. The minimum grade I'm going for is 64+ with the exception of a couple years.

Ho do I go about dipping without harming the coin?

E-Z-EST is way too strong for 99% of coins without dilution, for what it is worth. I don't like the stronger solutions, I prefer weak solutions and if they don't do what I want, I slowly step it up.

I never dip a coin more than a second. Dip, pull, rinse, assess, and repeat if necessary.

I received it today. I did some digging and it is certainly a VAM-1G on VAMWorld. The toning is not black, only in bad light, and it's more of a dark red/green with a whole ring of blue on the reverse.

I'm really horrible at taking pictures to get the tone, so the close-ups show the colors and the markers.

This one is not a candidate for a dip. Dipping is math - you get a certain number of seconds the coin can be soaking in dip during the course of its' life. This is cumulative even if fifty years passes between dips. When those seconds run out, and you've won the Dip Lottery, your coin is ruined forever in a fashion the whole world can see.

It happens without warning, the time difference between "OK" and "oops" is about 1/16th of a microsecond, and no two coins have the same total tolerance. It is, quite literally, numismatic Russian Roulette. You can dilute thiourea (the acid we're talking about here) with water and ameliorate the effect just as MorganGrader said. It works well for lesser problems. The cutoff moment still exists.

This coin is dark enough to require full strength for at least 6-8 seconds to remove the color, maybe more. A strong coin will last 10 seconds or a bit longer before forever losing its' luster. I saw one the guy said he'd given 15 seconds without losing the surfaces. Once.