Field cleaning a Roman coin turned into a total disaster

I found what looked like a cool bronze coin near an old farm road in Ohio last month. I figured a quick scrub with a wire brush and soap would be fine, but it stripped the patina and started pitting the surface immediately. Now I have a worthless hunk of metal instead of maybe a nice artifact. Should I have just left it caked in dirt until an expert could look at it, or is there any way to fix the damage I caused?

1 comments

1 Comment

nora543d ago

...so my buddy Mark did the exact same thing with a crusty old coin he found metal detecting near Chillicothe. He used one of those Dremel wire attachments, thought he was being careful. Ruined the whole surface in like ten minutes, the patina just flaked off in chunks. He was so mad he threw it in a drawer and didn't touch it for a year. When he finally showed it to a guy at a coin shop, the guy said yeah, the damage is permanent. No way to put the patina back. He said the only thing worse than leaving it dirty is scrubbing it with anything metal. You basically sand off the age and the value together. I don't think there's any fixing what you did, sorry. Just a hard lesson. Next time, wrap it in a paper towel, put it in a plastic bag, and don't touch it. Let someone who knows what they're doing handle it.