New Way to Clean and Cash in your Clad Coins?

At the last Deep Search Metal Detecting Club meeting club member Steve B. said that he brought a large number of his clad coins to the bank and cashed them in. We were all curious how he managed to cash in all the coins he had found both in the ground and on the beach without having the bank reject them because of their overall condition.

Steve explained that he had cleaned the coins using a wire brush attachment on his drill. He said he holds the coin with a small pair of pliers and turns on the drill and that they come pretty clean.

So like many of us who have these dirty, rusty looking clad coins hanging around, I decided to give it a try. I pulled out my DREMEL tool and put on the wire brush attachment.Before cleaning

Quarter left after cleaning. Right normal quarter 
The quarter I cleaned still has a brownish look to it, although not as bad as this photo. Using the wire brush did not damage the coin in any way which was something I thought would happen. Overall I thought the 'experiment' work well.

So now I will take a bunch of the cleaned coins to my local bank which has a coin cashing machine and see what happens. NOTE that if you do not have an account with the bank they will normally charge you a fee to cash in your coins. The other option is to roll them, however now I understand that some banks do not accept rolled coins.

Bob S. Webmaster