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Posted 08/15/2010 01:44 am
Yikes!
As my first experiment, I did something that I'm sure literally millions of people have already tried. I put some Nic-a-date on it.
I went a little further than that, actually. I put a pretty large quantity of Nic-a-date into a plastic cup. I then took a plastic hemostat, clamped it onto the quarter and positioned it into the liquid in such a way that the entire date area was immersed. I left it in for 5 minutes and pulled it out and it was every bit as dark as you see in my photos, below. I examined it closely and determined that it had not brought any of the date back. I then put it back into the liquid and drove off to my mother-in-law's for a fun filled day treating the black mold in her basement.
When I came home at about 1:00 AM I took it out again. It had been in the Nic-a-date for over 12 hours. To my eye the degree of darkness on the coin had not changed since the 5 minute mark I mentioned earlier, nor was there any evidence of any of the digits in the date.
The only thing that changed was that there now seemed to be something that looks very much like rust or corrosion at the level of Miss Liberty's knees. Whatever it is, it's brown and is distinctly different from the "dark" in the area where the date used to be. This line of "brown" is where the surface of the Nic-a-date met the air...sort of an air-chemical-metal convergence area. Hmmmm. Is that noteworthy, I wonder?
Please notice on the photo of the ENTIRE coin the Nic-a-date stain that extends up the right side (YOUR left) of the coin...sort of under "IN GOD". I produced that stain by dipping the coin back into the Nic-a-date for no more than two seconds and then immediately washing it off.
My point? The "damage" the Nic-a-date does to the coin happens almost immediately, but leaving it in the Nic-a-date for an extended period of time does not appreciably increase the damage.
It sure looked to me like a little dippity-doo into the jewelry cleaner would remove this stain...but it did absolutely NOTHING to remove or improve it.
So tomorrow (actually, later today) I'll fiddle around with this coin a bit more to see if I can get rid of the stain through chemical means and in the days ahead I'll start using more potent chemicals.
Here's a question to ponder: What if this had worked from the standpoint of restoring the date? Let's even go a step further and pretend it restored it as nicely as some dates can be restored on a Buffalo (or any other) Nickel. But let's also say the dark stain was unavoidable and NOT removable.
How good would you feel about having brought a dateless 1923-S quarter back into this world only to have it look like what you see below?
As my first experiment, I did something that I'm sure literally millions of people have already tried. I put some Nic-a-date on it.
I went a little further than that, actually. I put a pretty large quantity of Nic-a-date into a plastic cup. I then took a plastic hemostat, clamped it onto the quarter and positioned it into the liquid in such a way that the entire date area was immersed. I left it in for 5 minutes and pulled it out and it was every bit as dark as you see in my photos, below. I examined it closely and determined that it had not brought any of the date back. I then put it back into the liquid and drove off to my mother-in-law's for a fun filled day treating the black mold in her basement.
When I came home at about 1:00 AM I took it out again. It had been in the Nic-a-date for over 12 hours. To my eye the degree of darkness on the coin had not changed since the 5 minute mark I mentioned earlier, nor was there any evidence of any of the digits in the date.
The only thing that changed was that there now seemed to be something that looks very much like rust or corrosion at the level of Miss Liberty's knees. Whatever it is, it's brown and is distinctly different from the "dark" in the area where the date used to be. This line of "brown" is where the surface of the Nic-a-date met the air...sort of an air-chemical-metal convergence area. Hmmmm. Is that noteworthy, I wonder?
Please notice on the photo of the ENTIRE coin the Nic-a-date stain that extends up the right side (YOUR left) of the coin...sort of under "IN GOD". I produced that stain by dipping the coin back into the Nic-a-date for no more than two seconds and then immediately washing it off.
My point? The "damage" the Nic-a-date does to the coin happens almost immediately, but leaving it in the Nic-a-date for an extended period of time does not appreciably increase the damage.
It sure looked to me like a little dippity-doo into the jewelry cleaner would remove this stain...but it did absolutely NOTHING to remove or improve it.
So tomorrow (actually, later today) I'll fiddle around with this coin a bit more to see if I can get rid of the stain through chemical means and in the days ahead I'll start using more potent chemicals.
Here's a question to ponder: What if this had worked from the standpoint of restoring the date? Let's even go a step further and pretend it restored it as nicely as some dates can be restored on a Buffalo (or any other) Nickel. But let's also say the dark stain was unavoidable and NOT removable.
How good would you feel about having brought a dateless 1923-S quarter back into this world only to have it look like what you see below?
Edited by weerdsteev
08/15/2010 11:59 am
08/15/2010 11:59 am
