The first thing on your list of what not to do is the golden rule of coin collecting: Don’t clean your old coins. That’s coin-homicide and can mean a significant reduction in value of the coin’s mint state.
Knowledgeable buyers certainly won’t look twice at a coin that’s been cleaned so avoid the temptation. It’s not worth it in the end. It’s also one of the first things that I did when I was younger.
Since my coins weren’t looking nice and shiny and some of them were a bit dismal in color I gave them a nice thorough cleaning with soap and water and dried them off with a hand towel.
That was a disaster waiting to happen naturally and when I loaded them back into my small coin vault unfortunately some of them hadn’t dried properly and I ended up with green tinged coins instead of the slightly non-shiny ones I had earlier.
So avoid temptation and keep your itchy cleaning fingers away from your coins. Unless of course you just dug it up from your backyard – or someone else’s backyard – and it’s covered in mud. In this case you can clean it, but follow directions carefully on how to clean your coins.
There are many ways to do this but I can’t give any of them to you since I’ve stayed firmly away from cleaning any type of coin after that first disastrous attempt. Nowadays I just give it over to someone who’s better trained than I am and leave well enough alone!
For the most part though you really won’t want to clean your coins, they’re better off in the state they are and don’t need added help to appeal to other collectors. Part of the appeal lies in its current condition anyway, and you don’t want to be messing with that.
Remember, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Your coin isn’t broken so don’t attempt to fix it. It’s supposed to look like that.
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