Don't use toothpaste – Toothpaste is extremely abrasive. It can make your coins appear shiny, but cause significant damage to the surface. Don't use ketchup – You might have learned in science class that dipping a penny in ketchup can restore their shine.
Mix two tablespoons of table salt with one cup of white vinegar, and toss your coins in. Make sure not to mix metals. Let the coins soak for a few hours or even overnight. Take 'em out, rinse 'em off with distilled water, and let 'em dry. You can get it pretty much anywhere, or order the vinegar straight from Amazon.
Acid based cleaners will eat away at a coin's surface diminishing its value. According to research professor Vinod Patel, washing common coins with natural white vinegar and iodized salt in distilled water is a non destructive way of cleaning them.
Yes. A rinse in distilled water, or a soak in isopropyl alcohol, or acetone, or xylene will remove surface dirt or oils without hurting the coin, a long as you do no rubbing on the coin during the rise/soak, or when it is drying.
The oil-base makes WD-40 reasonably effective at removing it without a lot of work. There is of course some sacrifice when this stuff is removed but fortunately the metal underneath is in pretty good condition and the coin, in hand, is much more presentable.
The salt and acetic acid in vinegar do the trick. Hot sauce, like Tabasco or taco sauce, also will remove the oxides off pennies. As in ketchup, salt and vinegar are both in hot sauce. Coke and off-brand colas will quickly remove the tarnish.
Ammonium - Windex works fine. This will clean the coin without damaging the silver. Lemon Juice - This works great on hard to clean silver coins. Simply leave the coin in the juice until the desired amount of crud has been removed.
When it comes to cleaning dirty coins at home, Coca-Cola provides an option. This is because Coke contains phosphoric acid, which reacts with metal oxides due to its acidic nature. To clean your old coins using Coke, simply fill a bowl with it and allow them to soak.
While you may be tempted to polish your coins to make them look shiny and new, proceed with caution. Polishing and/or cleaning coins can reduce their value. Older coins that show deep age coloration are more desirable than coins whose surfaces have been stripped away by improper polishing or cleaning.
Don't soak the pennies for too long.
After a few minutes, the same reaction that dissolves stuck-on grime can begin to eat away at the copper.
Cleaning an old coin would remove the patina or toning that helps make it even more unique and visually appealing. Removing this effect can significantly reduce the value of the item. The other main reason you shouldn't clean old coins is that you can easily damage them.
Because the cleaning process required to restore the original bright and shiny look of the penny are nearly always abrasive, cleaning them rarely improves the grading of a valuable coin and almost always reduces the value.
Don't use toothpaste – Toothpaste is extremely abrasive. It can make your coins appear shiny, but cause significant damage to the surface. Don't use ketchup – You might have learned in science class that dipping a penny in ketchup can restore their shine.
When copper oxidizes, it turns a blue-green color, forming a compound called malachite. In Bowl 2, the vinegar and salt create a chemical reaction. This reaction dissolves the copper oxide (the dirty looking spots) and some of the copper on the outside of the penny. The result is a shiny looking penny!
Fill the plastic container with a 1-inch layer of warm water. Next, add a squirt of dishwashing liquid and agitate the water to create bubbles. Add the coins, and rub each one until the surface looks shiny. Rinse with warm water, then dry.
Soak coins in warm water mixed with liquid dish detergent to clean off light dirt and grime. Wash each coin gently with a soft toothbrush before rinsing and drying it. Scrub low-value coins with baking soda and vinegar, lemon juice and salt, or ketchup to break apart tarnish.
Dust your silver every so often using a soft cloth—it will help keep the tarnish away. And whenever you start to see it slightly tarnish (which will vary depending on the piece and how pure the silver is—less sterling tarnishes more quickly), simply give it a light cleaning using a gentle dish soap (like Dawn).
Vinegar and lemon juice both work really well for cleaning pennies. But, ketchup was the clear winners for our pennies, with soy sauce next, maybe with a little more time they would have gotten a little bit cleaner. This is a fun experiment to try with younger kids!
Place the scraped pennies into the beaker of toilet bowl cleaner. Let the penny sit in the cleaner for several days. Additional cleaner might have to be added to the beaker to dissolve all the zinc. This is also true of other low molarity HCL solutions.
STEP2 - Pour out a glass of your cola. STEP3 - Cover one side of each coin with Blu-Tac but leave the other side open. STEP4 - Pop your coins into your glass of coke. STEP5 - Sit back and wait but you should be able to see a difference in the colour of your coins within about an hour.
In this video, you'll see the stunning results of what happened when I tried cleaning coins with Hydrogen Peroxide. In my opinion, this is one of the most effective cleaning method, and the negative effects on coins are minimal. You can rinse and repeat the cleaning if you're not happy with the results.
Coins should never be cleaned or altered, as this negatively affects their value. We realize that there may be the temptation to do so, especially if a coin is heavily oxidized, has PVC damage, is difficult to make out due to heavy toning or is dirty due to improper storage.