| How to clean pennies
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How to clean pennies
We have all been there. You’re cleaning out some cellar or old closet, and you stagger on a bag of musty old coins. They smell bad and they look revolting. But they are still money, but you would like to get them in a little better shape. What should you do?
First, the best thing is to step back and make sure you want to do something at all. Some of those old coins can be quite valuable, and onslaught them will diminish them as much as 90&. They like custody that old patina in place. So take the time to look at them enough to identify them, and then use a coin guide or take them to a coin dealer to make sure that you don\'t have the family heirlooms in the bag.
If you\'ve strong-minded the coins are simply old, and not precious, then your can move on to actually cleaning the coins. If you look around the web, you can find a whole host of ideas on how to clean a copper penny. But make sure you are cleaning a copper penny. Since 1982, pennies have been minted with 97.5 percent zinc and only 2.5 percent copper. This was done as the price of copper kept climbing, and it was not going to be long until the copper content of a penny was worth more than the face value of the penny.
But zinc reacts in a different way than copper to some of the well-liked cleaning approaches to cleaning pennies, and in this case differently means that it will degrade more quickly, so any solution using acids or other reactive agents would best not be used on the newer pennies.
There are a whole host of ideas on cleaning pennies. Some ideas include:
Rubbing them clean with pencil erasers
Mixing a solution of vinegar and salt and soaking them
Using taco sauce as a cleaning agent
Using a brass cleaner such as Brasso
Using a wire brush with a small tool like a Dremel tool
Now some of these ideas will work much better than others. But others are in fact unhelpful to the coins, reducing the coin\'s value...
How to clean pennies >
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