At Lincoln Cents

What is AT'd?

if you take a torch and hold it away from the penny the coin will do that.
i rember as a teen we melted a coper penny over a whole in a copper pipe .
( my dad was nailing in the wall and hit a copper pipe in the bathroom)
the pipe was running side ways the nail had grazed the top of the pipe making a big leak. we shut off the water
my dad laid a old penny on it used a butane torch we had from a camping grill and melted it to the pipe it looked all funny , red ,green, bluish as it slowly melted around the pipe. It cooled off then my dad melted it agian and it just became a blob

I guess there's a few things I look for....I'll try to describe them.

- Unusual patterns. Toning usually tends to happen only on the fields, high points and along the rim (bulls-eye toning). AT just doesn't look right, it's just spread all over the place.
- Mexican fiesta of colors, color progression. Coins usually tone in a defined progression of color, not "swatches" of different colors. The book coin chemistry covers the progression for silver nicely....great book.
- Experience. LOL

Not always, you can do the lit match in a sulfur paper envelope for a few weeks and get AT that could fool some people.




Fair enough. LOL


Which I guess raises the question, for the most part we know what conditions cause natural toning. Is it considered AT if you create these conditions but allow the toning over a year or so? Is it to say that AT is toning you try to create and NT (Natural Toning) is unknowingly by accident.

Just a thought. Personally I still dont like toning for the most part.

So, is it considered natural or artificial if you place coins in a closed container where the air is sulfur-rich? I've always considered anything done on purpose to be artificial. I'll even go one further, if you know, or should know, that what you're doing will create toning - then it's artificial.

Now, we've all seen beautiful target toning caused from being placed in holders decades ago. That toning I consider natural - at the time, no one knew (except perhaps a few chemists) what would happen - so it was unintentional.

Just my Two Cents anyway.

When people buy toners, they may never know. NT is NT, regardless of it was sped up a little.

Nice Lincolns Thad, nice AT eye candy.