Oldsjunkie
Forum Supporter
So I posted a while ago about cleaning a key date V Nickel for presentation sake. It's a real shame how bad nickels come out of the ground, especially since some of my favorite coin designs are nicks. Pulled a 1916 Buffalo out of a park earlier this week and wanted to make it pretty before it went into the album. For the love of all that is bologna, please don't do this to a valuable coin! You don't see early Buffs with dates on em real often, so I didn't want to potentially rub the date off this one. I skipped the baking soda paste and went straight to the Gojo pumice cleaner with a soft rag. I worked the reverse first to see how it affected the lettering back there to gauge how the already difficult to see date would take the abrasion. The lettering took it pretty well so I worked both sides a little with some Gojo and water. Came out looking pretty nice. Hoping that shining up the high points would help the presentation of the coin and hopefully the contrast high to low would make the date pop a little. I took after it with a clean rag and some polishing compound. Big difference! You can see the date pretty plainly now, whereas before you had to get the light at just the right angle to read it. Gonna look much better in the album now. As with everything, YMMV. Thanks for looking and HH!