I Hate Dirty Coins A Lot! Cleaning Safely?

Are we talking about circulated coin that have a accumulation of dirt/oil/crud? Like what you find on wheat Cents? For copper I use mineral oil. But it doesn't well with silver. I would try the suggestion with acetone. I think why the strong recommendation is that people ruin coins because they don't know what to try. The best way to see if a method works for them is to experiment on a circulated coin that has no value except for what is marked on the back of them. Experiment on them first. See if you can find the solution of a face value coin, then try it on one you want to know about. Too many times what we do today we find out years later wasn't a good idea. So thus the strong warning about cleaning them. Most of the time it is best to leave them alone.

Just be careful what you do! I put some wheats in a pot to "cook", and ended up with a whole batch of coins that were BLACK! The crud was gone> but the coins were black. They seem to lose some of the blacksurface color, being handled, etc, but I believe it was too much Bi-carbonate of soda. mahbe they weren't rinsed well enough. Who knows. I have more that I would like to test, but I don't have the nerve, yet! One iof these days. I, like you hate the dirty, cruddy coins appearance, but we will have to live with that until we figure a way!
Dick

Yes I also HATE dirty coins when I am going thru rolls of circulated coins. I go thru about $100.00 at a time and you would not belive the dirty coins I come across. I myself do not even bother with them I just put them to the side and keep on searching the rolls until I am done with the roll then I just put them back. As for CLEANING coins I do not attempt to do that, I have found lot of great coins like the 2006 DDO EAR LOBE, I found 2 that were really dirty and I just put them in my 2x2's. But for what Vaslin said to clean with would be good XYLENE my freind uses it and he said it is good to use

acetone is a bad solution for coins. period. I see people use it time and time again, and it leaves a definite tell-tale sign behind, especially on copper, and it doesn't work well on any other metal.

Xylene only works well with copper.

Olive oil rots. Not good for coins. Use mineral oil instead, but expect a soak time of a month or more.

Brasso, acids, coin cleaner, jewelry cleaner - all horrible to coins.

Cooking cents with baking soda works well as long as you're not using a cast aluminum pot. That turns them black. Use porcelain coated steel instead.

Best single coin solution for cleaning off dirt...Goo-gone, available at most stores.

Rubbing or wiping a dirty coin will scratch it. Whatever you do, do it with care, don't use abrasives, and don't wipe a coin that has dirt on it.

While I'm averse to cleaning coins, I admit I've tried gentle cleaning where I felt a lot of dirt could eventually harm the surface.
However, I will not clean off dirt if I feel the removal would be obvious, ie showing redder copper underneath.

For some reason, copper coins appear to accumulate more crud than silver. I don't attempt to do anything to silver.
I haven't tried mineral oil yet, but found that pure alcohol works well on copper (and less hazardous than acetone)

So I have this process using existing tools here that works well. I soak the coin for a few hours in alcohol in a petri, and then transfer the coin to a small watch vise. The vise has soft plastic contact points that don't harm gold watches or even coin edges. With the coin secure, I transfer a small amount of alcohol to wet the surface. Then using a tip I got from a coin conserver, I use a small rose thorn in a drafting pencil chuck as my cleaning tool. This sounded odd to me at first, until I experimented and found a thorn's thin, flexible point is ideal for this work--and it won't scratch a BU copper coin. Now secure in the watch vise, I use a this tool and loupe to gently loosen the dirt from the coin. The trick here is to loosen dirt without changing the overall character on the coin. The less contact with the coin the better, and too much scrubbing or working the surface might become obvious. Once I loosened dirt in a few problem areas, I put the coin into alcohol and use a small, natural brush to flush away the dirt. Even with this gentle method, I don't overclean because some areas could become out of character with tight areas such as small cavities in letters.

Then only buy graded & newly minted coins from the worlds mints & us mint

a peck of dirt wont kill ya thats grand folk always told me.

I will have to try the Goo-Gone and see how it works. As for buying newly minted coins, that's no fun. I like to find the diamond in the rough.