I don’t know about anyone, but for me the question of monetizing instrument search as a hobby arose even before I bought my first metal detector. Why yours? Because for the first two months I was digging with an MD, which a friend kindly and disinterestedly left me. And yes, friends, thanks to the fact that I had to travel no more than 10-20 km to get to good and “fat” places to dig for coins, I was able to make money by selling the coins I found more than once.
And to be honest, this was about five years ago, when the trees were big and the sky was wild blue.
However, I have much more sales experience than most readers of such publications, which is why I want, in this note, to share this positive, or not always positive, example.
To begin with, let's immediately define the terms and, in general, what this note is about. If you are one of those diggers who dig for coins for fun and do not plan to sell your finds anywhere. If you clean them only for your own splendid contemplation in the format of a colorful panel or a candy jar. Then, this note will be completely useless to you and can only cause unwanted irritable emotions. But if you still purposefully dream of getting rich by selling swag found using MD, then you need to read the article to the end and do it meaningfully, and not, as usual, by looking only at the pictures.
How was it with me? Each time, arriving from another cop, I, like a zombie, didn’t go to wash my hands and do other things, but turned on the computer and started watching coin year reports with the latest sales. Everything that was more than five hundred rubles went into one jar, everything that was smaller went into a bucket with a volume of a couple of liters. At the end of the Kopar season, the bucket was moved. Kakaliks were sold in one lot for 500-800 coins at a time. More or less real coins went to an online auction in batches of 5-10 pieces.
Naturally, my first experience of selling coins at one of the most popular themed online auctions in the Russian Federation greatly disappointed me. Real prices from what was in the catalogs were 10-30%. Moreover, 30% was the most profitable case. I will talk about how outbids work at such auctions in another post.
So here it is. First of all, the annoyance of unfulfilled hopes for the soon same “When I get rich, I’ll buy a jacket with a shimmer” began to spread. I start to frantically think, “Maybe good coins are bought so cheaply because buyers don’t see how good they are? What a state of preservation they have and, in general, a fabulous, beautiful look.”
What do we have to do? The most logical answer is that they need to be cleaned.
I assure you, I went through all the stages of this murder movement, not incorrectly – the mass murder of dug coins. Electrolysis, copper brush, Dremel, laundry soap, and all kinds of household and professional chemicals. The only thing I haven't tried is ultrasonic cleaning. But, in this case, I really wanted to buy that installation, but the toad strangled me. And this is exactly the case when that same toad did the right thing by strangling.
As I remember now, those first and unforgettable comments in my profile at an online auction, when I put up for sale a slightly rare copper coin. I cleaned the coin with an expensive solution made in the USA. Well, there I removed the greenery from the coin and immediately patinated it. I served in the army, so I have a rich stock of derivatives of three swear words in the Russian language. But what the kind forum members gave me would have surprised even our company warrant officer.
The resulting stress forced me to delve deeper into the essence of the issue. The kick really turned out to be magical.
It turned out that the most important rule for any antiquity digger who wants to sell his swag as profitably as possible is to understand that the found coins and other cross-pendants must under no circumstances be cleaned!!!
In general, it is impossible, it is not necessary, it is unnecessary to tear your hands away if you are itching to rub a coin.
There is only one exception. Experienced collectors only accept cleaning coins with scrapers. If you don’t know what it is, Yandex can help you.
So it turns out that if you are going to professionally and seriously start selling the coins you find, you either need to study the topic of cleaning with scrapers, or not clean the coins at all. As a last resort, you can rinse the coin under running water using a soft-bristled toothbrush.
Believe me, real collectors, even from a weak and blurry photo on the Internet, will understand the true condition of the coin you found and will be able to estimate its value. Here is a clear example of a rare Peter's penny I found. How it looked when I put it up for online auction and how the buyer later cleaned it for his collection. And, the coin itself went away after an interesting snack between two buyers, for the amount of just under ten thousand rubles.
This is the advice. I hope you found the article interesting, so please don’t skimp on your likes, and send photos of your finds in the comments.
