Would CLR be safe to clean my old coins?
I have a nerdy hobby of collecting very old coins from the 1900′s from different countries. Recently I found a Canadian Penny dated to 1916, I found it in a box with a whole bunch of other old coins we found in my Grandfathers burned barn from years ago, but none of the other coins were quite as old as this one. The coin has sticky stuff on it and is basically covered in gunk and rust. I would love to clean it up and scrap book it, like I have my other old coins.
Would CLR cleaner wreck it? Or would it clean it up. Just wondering.
Thank You )
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If you don’t care about any possible future sale value and want to ‘improve’ the appearance of your coins, use silver cleaner on the silver coins and try Coke or a copper.brass cleaner for bronze coins. The penny is copper and does not rust, it corrodes.
If you do care about what they could be worth, leave them alone. Cleaning them destroys collector value.
The first rule to coin collecting is never clean the coin. As for coin collecting being "nerdy" I think you used the wrong wording for coin collecting is "The Hobby of Kings". A lot of the worlds greatest people were coin collectors. Teddy Roosevelt as president was so interested in our coins that he even had the designs changed to be more artistic. Now if the coin has say glue, or grease you can put it in 100% acetone from a hardware store not nail polish remover. That will dissolve the glues and greases then rinse in distilled water and air dry. There is nothing than can be done for rust for it has eaten into the metal, you remove it and you remove the metal also. The acetone will not harm the coin and other than that leave it alone.