The secret of cleaning coins.

use ketchup and scrub it while it's in ketchup. The longer it inketchep the cleaner it gets.

 

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is that just the salt and vinegar in it.i just showed my girlfriend what happes if you leave a penny in vinegar overnight. bad news for copper coins thats for sure.

 

no, there something in there that cleans it

 

Please don't clean your coins Unless it's something that is only worth face value, you are making a big mistake. Collectors like original coins, not bright and shiny cleaned coins.

 

Ketchup will NOT work for cleaning your coins AND keeping any value that they may have. If you want to sell your coins for any type of profit, DO NOT CLEAN YOUR COINS WITH ANY TYPE OF MATERIAL.

~AJ

 

If you want really clean coins, stick them in bleach. By clean, I mean even worse than before : )

 

Ketchup!! Comon....with all the ingredients in this red mess the 2 major components are Vinegar (acetic acid) and the normal acidity of tomatoes are the cleaning agents...bad news for coins....there has to be at least a100 comments on this fourm about cleaning coins...cleaning coins is like looking down the barrel of 12G Remmington and pulling the trigger...OUCH!!! That will mess up your whole day my friend...Just say no to cleaning!

RickieB

 

Of course it does clean coins. It's just acid. And if you aren't clean enough, please soak yourself in ketchup too!!!

 

i used one of those mr. clean sponges where you just add water to it and it will magically clean whatever marks you have on walls or whatever. well i used one to clean a silver war-time nickle, i kept scrubbing it with the spong till it got completly worn out, i think it did a fairly good job cleaning it. i just used one to clean 1 coin for fun, cost me $1 (the price of the mr. clean sponge) and about half an hour, to get it in this condition:

(i don't know why it turn up a brownish color on the scan, but when viewed in real-life it's actually a light-gray color)

 

You should have kept it a secret.

 

First time I've ever seen Tom carrying a sign.

 

The funny thing is, if you ever used soy sauce to "clean" copper coins, they do some interesting effects. Try it on some really cheap copper coins that you have. Even a dip in it for a few mins give some sort of cleaning effect.

 

Soy sauce is a fermented product, and since the saccharomyces produce acetic acid (same as vinegar), in conjunction with the high salt content (usually about 18% I believe), you are going to have a fairly high presence of chloride ions which will react with the copper oxide.

 

There is a link around here somewhere, I can't seem to find it, that advocates cleaning coins in a rock tumbler. Maybe if you put the ketchup and soy sauce in one of those, it will work twice as well.

 

Why not just sandblast them?

 

Now we're thinkin' !

 

Actually I am a proponent of people cleaning coins - all their work tends to increase the value of my collection without me doing a thing.

 

Soaking in Ketchup is bad as you heard but I dont know if anyone commented on the "scrubbing"
Please dont do either. Scrubbing is just as bad as using ketchup.....leave em alone...run them under water, dont rub.