Cleaning Coin With Tomato

With tomatoes currently @ $4.00 per pound in Canada , I can think of a heck of a lot better things to do
with a tomato , like a yummy salad with French Dressing .

Never ever clean coins . Tomatoes are acidic , that's a no no . No brushing with toothbrush or ammonia soap & water and definitely no boiling any coins .
It drastically reduces the value of any coin . Only ancients can get away with a cleaning by someone who knows what they are doing .

Yokozuna, thank you for information. Will try aceton bath.
I metal detect a lot and some often needs cleaning :)

To my eye, you improved that coin quite bit (as long as the scratches were already there). It sounds like you have experimented enough to know what you are doing.

Tomato juice is a fairly weak acid. It is about 100 times weaker than lemon juice or most vinegars. Probably this fact, plus the need for the acid (juice) to diffuse through the tomato pulp, makes it a more slow, gentle form of "cleaning with an acid" than other approaches.

I see this coin is made of Ni-Brass alloy. I would guess the results on other compositions could be very different.

tdziema

Yes, I dug it in the woods (Lithuania) and scratches were already there. In some places soil can be very acid. Not to mention how bad it is in UK. But I am talking only about those coins that are found in the ground and in poor condition. Not to make illusion for people that I buy and ruin coins with toothbrushes or sanding paper :D No, no, I don't do that. Only experiment with coins that have no value and need attention.

You are absolutely right. Diffusing tomato juice would really make things so much better. For me it ideally work to remove green oksids from silver coins and it doesn't make metal shine or damage patina. All detectorists came across with this problem.

Regarding metal composition, with copper coins you need to be careful. It can leave gingerish color on the coin and it not always can work ideally.

Silver101,

All people are with different taste ;)
Better than tooling, smoothing coins and selling to people without letting them know :)

Chemically every Tomato is different. Therefore this is rather dumb since one Tomato may do little and the next one could melt the coin. Not really but could do a real number on it. And don't forget nowadays there are numerous different Tomatoes. So should we be using Red ones? Yellow ones? Striped ones? etc., etc., etc,? Round ones, pear shaped ones, large or small ones?

The ones that I recommend are the Organic Italian Plum Tomatoes . Guaranteed to strip the Zinc right off a U.S. steel cent .