How to remove this tarnish

[FFkook]

So i have a small plan with this coin, but it's a little blackened on top, not sure if you can see it as I made a quicky.. 

How do I simply remove this tarnish without damaging the coin? It's a 999 fine silver (poormans sovereign) 

Thanks in advance! 

[Pete]

The way to remove all tarnish in seconds is to use an acidic dip called e-Zest.
This works for sure with a dip of about 4 seconds followed by an immediate rinse in water.
If you haven't got any then I am afraid in the UK ( unlike in the USA ) it is expensive.

What you might want to try though - take a plastic or glass container and lay a sheet of aluminium kitchen foil on the bottom.
Add a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda ( baking soda ) on top of the foil.
Pour very hot water into the container to a depth of about 2cm.
Lay your silver coin on top of the aluminium foil and leave for say 15 minutes.
This will remove most ( all if lucky ) of the tarnish but might not get rid of all of it.

[5huggy]

2 hours ago, Pete said:

The way to remove all tarnish in seconds is to use an acidic dip called e-Zest.
This works for sure with a dip of about 4 seconds followed by an immediate rinse in water.
If you haven't got any then I am afraid in the UK ( unlike in the USA ) it is expensive.

What you might want to try though - take a plastic or glass container and lay a sheet of aluminium kitchen foil on the bottom.
Add a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda ( baking soda ) on top of the foil.
Pour very hot water into the container to a depth of about 2cm.
Lay your silver coin on top of the aluminium foil and leave for say 15 minutes.
This will remove most ( all if lucky ) of the tarnish but might not get rid of all of it.

I have found this to be the most gentle method of cathodic/anodic  cleaning - although i only do this to low quality coins for purely aesthetic purposes

[zittergie]

I use the following method succesfully:

Fill a small cup with vinegar.  Add salt.  Put aluminium foil in it.  Put the coin on the foil.  If it works, you can see the tarnish disappear in seconds.  It is like magic.  Rinse the coin with water.

Although I never had any negative side-effects, I would not recommend it with expensive coins.

[TheBeast]

3 hours ago, Pete said:

Pour very hot water into the container to a depth of about 2cm.
Lay your silver coin on top of the aluminium foil and leave for say 15 minutes.
 This will remove most ( all if lucky ) of the tarnish but might not get rid of all of it.

I've tried this with the silver tarnished neckless of my daughter and it worked out perfectly 👍

[ChrisF]

Goddards silver dip sold on Amazon. Its as good as Ezest and cheaper. Trust me, i use it to  clean all my collector bullion. I buy tarnished coins cheap and clean them up for my collections. 

[FFkook]

13 minutes ago, ChrisF said:

Goddards silver dip sold on Amazon. Its as good as Ezest and cheaper. Trust me, i use it to  clean all my collector bullion. I buy tarnished coins cheap and clean them up for my collections. 

Just dip, rinse and dry? No side effects? Ive seen HG and Haggerty silver dip for sale here, probably all the same right? 

[ChrisF]

14 minutes ago, FFkook said:

Just dip, rinse and dry? No side effects? Ive seen HG and Haggerty silver dip for sale here, probably all the same right? 

What i do is set out 3 bowls, dip in the silver dip, then into a bowl of distilled water and bicarb then a final dip in distilled water.  Pat dry and you are done.  I dont have any knowledge of the other dip you mentioned. 

[daz]

On 11/12/2018 at 15:27, ChrisF said:

Goddards silver dip sold on Amazon. Its as good as Ezest and cheaper. Trust me, i use it to  clean all my collector bullion. I buy tarnished coins cheap and clean them up for my collections. 

I had a coin that was covered in black paint or marker pen it cleaned it up brilliantly

[Bimetallic]

On 09/12/2018 at 08:03, FFkook said:

So i have a small plan with this coin, but it's a little blackened on top, not sure if you can see it as I made a quicky.. 

How do I simply remove this tarnish without damaging the coin? It's a 999 fine silver (poormans sovereign) 

Thanks in advance!

The aluminum foil and baking soda method will easily clean that tarnish, and it's much cheaper than buying a dip. I made some refinements to the method, copied below:

First, I discovered disposable aluminum foil cookware and food trays. They come in all shapes and sizes, and the small tart pans are perfectly sized for this task – the ones I bought are about four inches in diameter. This replaces both the bowl and aluminum foil with one part. (There are also small meatloaf pans that would work well for this task.)

I like this solution partly because standard aluminum foil is pretty thin and fragile. I once accidentally punched a hole through the foil while I was lining a bowl for this anti-tarnish procedure. This can be avoided of course if you're just more careful than I was that day, but the disposable aluminum foil cookware eliminates the issue and simplifies the logistics. Also note that you can probably use the disposable pans more than once, and they're very cheap – I bought a pack of 50 tart pans for $10 on Amazon. That's 20 cents per pan, and it will be a long, long time before I need to buy more. You can find them in any supermarket or Walmart, Amazon, or Jet – just get the smallest you can find.

A second-best solution is to use heavy duty aluminum foil. It's also available in any supermarket and Walmart, at maybe a buck or two more than standard foil.

My second refinement was the salt. Salt is not just salt. Standard table salt has anti-caking agents added to it (2% of total weight), sometimes other minerals, and often iodine. I don't know that any of that is harmful to silver or sticks to silver even after rinsing, but my attitude is to eliminate those variables if possible.

I discovered canning and pickling salt. Never heard of it before, but it turns out to be awesome because it's pure salt. No anti-caking agents (which are apparently undesirable for canning and pickling) and no iodine. It's just salt. Even better, it's very finely ground, so it dissolves quickly.

It's also incredibly cheap. You can get a 4 lb. box of the Morton's brand at Walmart for less than two bucks. Other brands I've seen are Ball (2 lb. bags) and Mrs. Wages (3 lb. bags). They're more expensive (but still cheap), but they come in resealable bags instead of the useless cardboard box that Morton's uses (once you open it, you can't really close it or seal it, so you should probably store it inside a big Ziploc freezer bag).

(All links are to the manufacturers' sites, not to stores. Ball brand is under Jarden Brands, which is under some other company, and their website is freshpreserving.com for some reason.)

Baking soda is baking soda – sodium bicarbonate – so just get the cheapest. I've never seen a brand that added anything to baking soda.

To prevent tarnish, I recommend storing silver in Ziploc snack bags. These were a recent discovery as well. I was using sandwich bags, but snack bags are much smaller, more right-sized for storing 1 - 10 oz. rounds and bars. I especially like the double-zipper or double-seal kind, which Walmart sells under its Great Value house brand. They're super cheap. Flatten the air out of the bags before you zip.