Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

Has anyone tried to tone their own silver? I heard you could tone your own silver using an plain envelope. Has anyone tried this?

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

Someone once told me that a quick way to tone silver was to carry it for two weeks up your rectum. I passed on it.

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

Is there some subtext here I'm not getting...:D

Seriously, though, I've never heard of that.

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

I ran into it in a couple places:

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

Give it a try -- I don't really have any numismatic silver.

I actually polished some of my 90% because they look nicer than with black all over it -- they're just meltable coins, anyway. I could try it on those.

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

Hmm. I owned and operated a metal smithing shop for quite a while and we used to blue and tone our metals, but I never did silver or gold. Copper, Steel, Iron, aluminum, etc.

We used different degrees of heat, never chemicals, except for Copper for green oxide and somtimes some on aluminum, but i rarley used aluminum.

I wonder if the same could be down with silver. The toning is just silvers form of oxidation to protect itself, so maybe extract sulfer from a batter, or use a low heat, controled method. I dont have enough of my own silver to risk ruining it, but if you've got a spare ounce or so try it, or send it on over and ill try it ;)

A an active battery, one that is currently producing electricity, as in its poles connected or running something like a light, DC motor/fan etc placed in water will draw out gasses in small amounts, including sulfur. Maybe you could find a way to make that work. I dont know if you would need to dip the silver in the active water or just put it over the top for the gasses. I think in either case it would have to be quickly done and not left to degrade from the acidity. Just a thought. Then baking soda over top real quick to break down the acid content to cease degredation.

Just thoughts!

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

I already asked my dealer, and they can tell if you try to heat the coins to tone them.

What you have to do is get a book on making old time paper with sulfur in it, then put your coins in the paper for 100+ years.

Re: Has anyone tried toning their own silver?
 

When I was very active on the PCGS forums, many tried their hands at toning silver - myself included (curiosity only). It's not difficult to tone silver, however, what is very difficult is to get an attractive tone (rainbow-style).

Silver will tone in a manila envelope but not a regular paper envelope. Unless you introduce other factors, it would take years to tone in the manila type envelope.

Place that same envelope (manila) today with the silver sealed in it, placed on a sunny window sill, will cause the silver to begin to tone after a week or so - but lightly. The theory behind why silver toned in manila type envelopes had to do with the acid content in the paper. By placing the coin in a manila envelope and let it sit in a sunny window sill (or on a steam radiator), the heat accelerated the toning of the silver. The problem was most times the toning was not that attractive (unlike the ones that spent 30+ years stored in an envelope in someone's desk drawer).

Another way to tone silver is to apply heat to the silver directly. You can use a propane torch, kitchen stove - almost anything that has a direct flame. You will get some very nice colors - greens, blues etc. - but no rainbow toning. It takes a lot of trial and error using direct heat on a silver piece to get an attractive tone, but I saw pictures of some nice ones. From the ones I tried to tone this way, I discovered that it was necessary to apply the flame for short periods of time - and keep doing that until you got the colors you liked.

Another method was to bake the coins in an oven. They will tone on their own, however, the "coin doctors" knew what chemicals to use and how to apply them to the coins before heating them in order to make rainbow toned silver coins that fooled many people until it got around that the silver was being "doctored". To a collector, a doctored coin has little value; however, a naturally toned piece could bring a large premium. The serious collectors think of coin doctors as lowlife's. They would artificially tone a coin and sell it at a premium - representing the toning as "natural". Man, you should have seen the debates and posts on the PCGS forums on this topic! They probably are still at it today.

There are a few coin doctors so good; they can artificially tone a coin and fool experts. A writer for a coin magazine (I don't remember the name of the magazine), located a top coin doctor who agreed to let the writer watch him artificially tone a Morgan Silver dollar and then submit it for grading at PCGS (the best 3rd party grading company), and get it slabbed. BTW, if PCGS even suspects that a coin is artificially toned (no matter how attractively), they will return it to the submitter ungraded and not slabbed - they do charge the submitter anyway.

Anyway, to finish up this long post, the writer watched this "top" coin doctor work on the Morgan Silver dollar. The doctor used very fine artists' paintbrush to apply different chemicals to the coin in order to achieve the much-desired rainbow toning that collectors would pay a premium for. The writer posted about some of the doctors techniques and not about others - which he was sworn never to repeat as a condition to let the writer witness the coin doctoring process. The writer was allowed to take pictures at different stages of the artificial toning process and included them with his finished article.

Once the coin doctor had applied his secret chemicals, the writer said that the coin was then heated to complete the toning process. He was not allowed to write how that was accomplished, however, some of the more knowledgeable people on the PCGS forums pretty much figured out how it was done. Long story, but in the end, the coin went to PCGS and it passed as genuine and was slabbed and graded. That really got the folks at PCGS upset when this article came out, and after that, PCGS was very strict on toned coins. PCGS even refused to grade and slab some legit toned coins - just because they thought that the toning "might" be "enhanced".

During that time, an acknowledged coin doctor was selling toning kits which contained various chemicals - along with instructions on how to tone silver coins. I bought one of the kits to experiment with, but never got around to trying it out. I still have the kit somewhere, but I don't remember where I stored it.

The ethics of artificially toning coins was debated - usually quite heatedly. In the end, most of the collectors didn't have a problem with an artificially toned coin as long as the coin was represented as being artificially toned. However, the coin doctors who artificially tone coins and they get passed off as naturally toned coins are despised to this day. Some of the more unscrupulous coin dealers (yes, they DO exist ;-) send coins to the doctors to have them artificially tone and then they pay the coin doctor and sell the now toned coin for a premium to an unsuspecting collector. The collector crowd - and rightfully so MHO consider them the scum of the earth.

So, long story made longer, yes I have tried to tone silver coins (just to see how it was done and if I could do it). I still have all of the coins I attempted to artificially tome using the various methods described above - and others as well. A coin doctor I'm not. There are a variety of ways to accelerate attractive toning on a silver coin and if you Google coin doctors or coin doctoring you should be able to find much more written on this subject. Of course, the PCGS forums would still have archived threads dedicated to this subject (possibly some current ones too).

The bottom line is this: a naturally toned coin takes much time to happen and very few of them end up attractively toned - but they bring large premiums for that very reason. To artificially tone a coin takes heat, chemicals and a variety of other accelerants in order to "make" a toned coin. Try to find some of the threads discussing this topic and then try out the different techniques on some generic silver - you can even tone modern circulating coins (pocket change) by using some of the techniques described above.

JR

PS: Some of the more hardcore collectors consider a coin left in a manila envelope for 50 years to be artificially toned, however, most do not. Artificially toning coins remains a touchy subject for some and I guarantee that the discussions regarding toned coins will rage on forever in the collector communities.