Should i clean morgan dollar

Use acid-free cardboard and plastic holders free from polyvinyl chloride PVC. PVC eventually coats a coin with sticky green slime. A safe-deposit box at a bank is ideal. If you have a home collection, ensure that your home insurance covers full replacement costs. Skip navigation. Your browser is out of date. For the best and most secure experience in our catalog, please update your browser.

Shop Shop. About News Learn. These are easily spotted by experts, as their lettering and other design details typically are distorted a bit by this action. WIPED describes a coin that displays surface hairlines in one or more isolated areas. This is usually the result of accidental mishandling rather than intentional cleaning, but it still requires Details Grading. Many will even turn their noses up at a rare, cleaned coin from the s or early s if a more expensive, original version is available or soon might be.

Sometimes, cleaning coins does much more than remove its original coloration. In fact, in most cases, anything more than a simple surface rinsing with water to dislocate loose debris will actually remove tiny bits of metal from the coin. Abrasive coin cleaners, such as baking soda, toothpaste, jewelers rouge, and acids will literally remove the upper surface of the coin, leaving it in an irreparable state.

Coins cleaned in such an abusive manner have an unnatural reflectivity, and upon close inspection with a magnifying glass countless striations and hairlines can be seen scarring the surface. Sometimes these hairlines will be evident with the naked eye. No matter how alluring the label on the package reads, my advice is to steer clear of these products or exercise extreme caution if you insist on trying one or the other brands out there. While it is certainly true that a quick dip of a fraction of a second may not cause too much obvious damage, it will still remove some metal, no matter how slight.

Dipping, even for a millisecond, will reduce or eliminate these flow lines. The coin will also lose its natural mint-made lustre. Remember also that the longer the dip the more the potential damage. It can, and usually does, turn an OK coin into a dog. The dipping does not last forever as we shall soon see. Morgan silver dollar without any evidence of even a slight bit of toning? These coins are well over years old and, except for the hoards released by the U.

Treasury about 50 years ago, it is virtually impossible for any silver coin that old to be as bright and shiny as the day it fell off the coining press. The answer is a quick dip. Toning is a natural phenomenon to any silver item, including coins. No matter how careful grandma was with her silver place setting and no matter how carefully it might have been wrapped, toning occurs and the silver cleaner comes out.

As to the dipping not lasting forever, I personally have witnessed many coins that turned dark or had black specks and spots in a relatively short period of time. One incident in particular is the sad story of a group of commemorative coins I dispatched to a major grading service in the states.

He had bought them unencapsulated from a trustworthy source, or so he believed. My friend called me less than a year later in an almost panic-stricken voice. I went right over to his apartment. Five of the coins turned either completely dark or had numerous black specks here and there. I sent them off to the company that had encapsulated them with a note describing the circumstances. The return shipment also included a letter of apology, which was nice but did not address the problem in the first place.