This large 30mm bronze coin found in Franche first appears to be a 10ct Napoléon III coin. However, the caption shows d’ITA on the right which indicates it’s an italian coin « 10 centesimi » Victor Emmanuel II. Such coin could be used in France under the Latin Monetary Union whose founding members were France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. The trick here is to remove the hard crust without damaging the usually very nice green patina for this coin that was minted 150 years ago. To clean this coin we used the carbon tip of the conservator wooden pen; to get more accuracy we switched to the precision pencil, still using the carbon tip. We purposedly chose to clean half of the coin to show the difference. In 10 minutes we got this impressive result. If you do not push to hard on the tip, and use circular motions then you may not damage patina. If you’re concerned you may not be experienced enough to do so, switch to the glass fiber tip of the precision pencil when you narrow from the « green » surface of the coin. The glass fiber will NOT damage patina, even if you’re a beginner cleaner. We then used our thin sharp needle to remove tiny pieces of dirt that were still stuck in some letters of the caption; do not scratch caption letters with carbon tip as you may damage patina; switch to needles that are more accurate to clean inside or between letters and not ON them. When cleaning is over we applied our conservator wax for a great result !
