Cleaning Coins - Are You Insane?

 One side of the metal detecting hobby that has almost become a hobby in its own right, is the cleaning of clad coins. I'm not talking about touching up valuable silver collectors' coins, oh no! I'm talking about everyday dirty money. Coins you dig up, find baking in the sun, or laying on or in sand, soil and muck. Filthy little metal disks...discolored, (and if zinc, half-rotted) unloved and as pitiful as a token of exchange can get. Now I know detectorists that LOVE to fill things with all the coins they have found. Big, clear, plastic 5-gallon water dispenser bottles, glass mason jars, aquarium fish tanks, a casket (you can TRY to take it with you!), milk jugs, thermos bottles, and on and on.  

                                      

Your Second Hobby - It's Complicated

Eventually, though, a new metal detector with some new amazingly advanced technical abilities makes the scene (daddy-oh) and you slowly become aware of all that metallic cash littering your seaside party barge. You need to either bank it by cleaning and rolling them or rinsing them off in hot water and tossing them in a Coinstar machine that counts it and takes anywhere from 8% to 10% of the total for services rendered, the result being you get handfuls of cash money ready for spending or banking. 

Now, if you are like a good deal of detectorists, you will go and spend $75 on a motorized tumbler; spinning rubber drums filled with chemicals, tumbling media (small gravel) and coins to be cleaned. And the TIME it takes to get all the coins through the process. Remember TIME, we will come back to it.

I clean coins myself by throwing them all in a perforated drum (a spaghetti colander will work) rinsing the dirt off with hot water, or hot water and a little dish soap, drying them off, then tossing them in a Coinstar. I readily collect the cash, sans Coinstar's 10 percent, and that's it. And the Coinstar Organization is more than welcome to their percentage. The other process, the hobby-within-a- hobby, is a small industry in itself. Now some people with a lot of time on their hands do like to complicate things sometimes, and if there are more gadgets and devices involved, well, all the better!

Banks are notorious for complicating things, and you cannot just deposit dirty coins, oh no! They must be clean, shiny even, and they must be carefully counted and be rolled in separate little denomination tubes, sometimes also printed with your account number. And of course, you need to travel to said bank, stand in line, have the bank rep count the little tubes. But this all comes after you have mixed dishwashing detergent, salt, vinegar, gravel, and other stuff into a slurry filling only half the tumbler. Then wait at least 30 or 40 minutes to tumble a few handfuls of coins, which you then dump into a colander to separate the coins from the gravel, then rinse them, then dry them, then counting and rolling, etc. Also remember you cannot just dump all the coins in together, oh no! Dimes, nickels, quarters, half-dollars, and on up, must be separated from the pennies or they will turn pink during the process. And we cannot have that! 

Finally, after half-a day, you have made a dent in your clad coins and spend some more time cleaning up after the process. Meanwhile I have long finished rinsing and cashing in all my coins and am at the beach with my detector looking for more. And when all your labor, which is worth something in itself, is added up, you have probably spent more in time and materials than your coins were ever worth. That's my opinion, of course, but then again, it is entirely your preference how you want to clean your treasure. Just food for thought. Good luck and happy hunting!