New coin cleaning method that works surprisingly well!

[drex]

Just as a preface, I haven't posted anything to the forums in awhile, but I have been following it silently on and off over the past few years. Over that time, I have been experimenting with some different ways to conserve coins, trying to think outside the box and try some unique solutions. This is the first method that actually produced surprisingly good results, and it only uses one cheap ingredient: glue. It sounds crazy, normally glue is something that is contaminating the surface of a coin, but in this case, I have found a way to potentially use it to remove surface contaminants and junk off the coin face. NOTE: this is experimental and should not be used on any valuable coins that have any remote value.

For these experiments, I have been using Elmer's glue, and simply covering one of the faces of the coin completely and then letting it dry. This glue hardens in a uniform sheet, and doesn't adhere to metal very well, making it a perfect candidate for work on coins. Once it is dry, just peel the hardened layer of glue off the coin to reveal all the crud it removed (purposely applying some glue over the edge of the coin as a lip to peel from helps tremendously in the removal process, just place the coins on wax paper so it is easy to lift the coins off from). Most of the coins I have experimented with have shown improvements, but each application only removes one layer of junk from a coin, so if there are many layers built up then it might take multiple applications to remove it all. That being said, I photographed 10 coins before and after one round of treatment. The camera and lighting were in the exact same spot for both shots, the settings were set on manual and were kept the same (including manual white balance), and there was no doctoring of any kind afterwards on the computer. All I did to the images was place them side-by-side and added some text so it was clear which one was the before coin and which one was the after. I attempted to choose some coins that have a relatively small amount of crud, and some that would normally go straight in the rejects bin. Out of all of them, the 1960-D and 1997-P showed the most improvement.

Some of the downsides I have noticed are that it does effect the color of bright red coins (as seen on the 1979-P shot). It also produced some awful toning on a bu shield cent that I used as one of my first test subjects (didn't photograph). That being said, let me know what you think, and even though Elmer's glue might not be the best choice, maybe there is another type that would work better?