Which button looks best to you?

I prefer the one with patina on the left.

I like the left one. The right just doesn't seem cool to me.

It's all a matter of what you feel looks the best and would like to have displayed for your enjoyment. I also prefer the patina on it. If you have alot of them then do a little of both and let whoever is looking at them decide what they like best. Someone else posted something awhile back where after they cleaned all the crub off they dipped it in hot wax which left the patina but also brought out alot of details. The result were fantastic looking in my opinion.

Took some digging but found the thread. Chad's posts about midway down.

http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=206596

Definitely the left, because the makers mark is not important enough to me to justify such a harsh cleaning removing all the patina. But if it was an early rare military, and if that was the only choice to show the detail on the face (which is extremely unlikely) I would clean it. I've only ever had one good button that I had to be extremely aggressive on, and it's because it was black and looked as if it had been in a fire. My usual methods did nothing, and since the detail was sunk into the button I got the idea to start polishing it to see if I could reveal the detail which was near 100% covered. After a couple hours I was down to the base metal and the full detail of the design was now showing, and even though it was a pretty ugly cleaning result, it was still better than what it was. Apart from that I have never stripped a find the same way you have to reveal the detail, but it does come down to personal preference. To me a display case of all items in that condition would be more an eye sore than a nice dug collection.

Thanks for the input.


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The only way id use electrolysis on a button is if it has stuff stuck to it. Not patina. Usually u do more harm then good. Something can always be cleaned. But never uncleaned. The only button I had success with was this. And u can see no deep patina. Just surface. I say leave em be that eay u can talk about what they are not just have someone read the back Mark