My Ancient Coin Cleaning Diary

Just wanted to create a thread to share my successes and failures in cleaning ancient coins since I have been doing a lot of it and expect to continue with it.

A few word on the ethics of cleaning Ancients:

As most of you reading this know, cleaning modern coins is an absolute taboo. It ruins the patina, lowers the value, risks scratching the coin, and generally is just something you don't want to mess with unless you absolutely have to.

In Ancients, it's a bit different. Ancient coins come out of the ground. So every ancient coin has already been cleaned at least once in its life in order to bring it to market, unless you buy a lot of uncleamed coins found by metal detectorists or archeologists in Europe/Asia or happen to be wealthy enough to have pedigreed coins that were never buried and passed through hands for sometimes hundreds or over a thousand years.

So most folks feel that cleaning Ancients as an acceptable practice as long as it is done well and efforts are made.to.preserve the original patina as much as possible. Unfortunately not all Ancients can be saved with a light patina preserving cleaning. Therefore, there is a e flow chart of increasingly harsh methods that are used depending on the level of corrosion, bronze disease, horn silver, dirt., from minor mechanical cleaning all the way up to MS70 and electrolysis which literally eat some of the metal and the patina completely. Sometimes coins are bad enough that this is a necessity though.

My values on cleaning Ancients:

1.) Use the least invasive methods possible, and try to preserve as much of the patina and/or toning when possible.

2.) Never clean a fully attributable ancient with clear features just because I don't like the toning or patina. Toning still matters to ancient folks

3.) I'm an amateur, so I will only stick to cleaning coins I estimate at around $100 or less. That may change as my expertise grows.