Last Verdigris Removal of 2016

My final verdigris kill and restoration for 2016. Two beautiful medals from a numista member, one of which reacted very bad once treatment began.

First lets have the smooth restoration that went without a hitch, with great results and no bad reaction to heat.

The first shot shows the verdigris untouched, I expected deep pitting but was pleasantly surprised.



I was too eager and missed taking a picture of this side pre heat treatment. This shows the verdigris charred and ready for the removal process. Even though the ship is visible in the image, it did not appear so in hand. The restored image shows a lot more detail regardless of unavoidable pitting.






The second medal was jaw dropping to say the least. This one had verdigris around the neckline of the obverse, but only spotting as an early verdigris stage.

Again I was more focussed on actually doing the restore rather than taking the before images. I can however give a prime example that a coin may react badly to heat which is something I cannot predict due to endless metal types involving copper, especially medals. This is why I have to make it clear to anyone who has ever asked me to do it for them, it really can go wrong without warning and must be prepared for, even if that chance is very low.

This is showing how the medal reacted to the heat, which was rather upsetting with a medal this beautiful apart from the green spotting. The medal was a light chocolate brown typical with bronze, just to give an idea of the before and after (Pictured below)



You can see how the background field reacted very bad to the heating and was very unpredictable as I expected bronze to be a little more hardy than this.

But of course I am never one to give up and after two days of painfully slow and gentle restoration, I finally got the original finish back more or less.



I am by no means happy it reacted the way it did but was saved, even though I managed to coax the original 100% patina back without using any kind of unnatural additives, this was done by another method of heat and several quench methods to get the metal to react a certain way.

This of course is my last Verdigris removal of 2016 and I look forward to doing many more restorations in the future on a broader spectrum of metal types.

See you next year!

Awesome work as always

WOW!!

In the first case, is that verdigris or PVC damage?

In the second one, was there any verdigris?

Both were verdigris, that is why you see pitting on both sides of the first medal.

The ship side is what it looked like after the coin had been fired, which is why it looks black rather than green.

The second medal was again verdigris in its infant stage. It starts just like mould does and then eats down into the metal.

I've got a bunch of coins to recover and I read all your information
but ... I'm so lazy

Verdigris kill and restoration.
Fluke you are a pioneer in this field – I look forward to your 2017 projects. Keep up the great work. Ed

Wow, breathtaking cleaning!

Absolutely amazing, these look beautiful!
I may have said it before, but you're an actual wizard.