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Polishing silver before selling

Hey everyone, I've made it a hobby this year of going around to the thrift stores and estate sales looking for treasures and I recently began picking up silver items to sell on here. I think I made a mistake with my first two by cleaning them up with some polish. Should I clean the tarnish/patina off before listing or would I have a better chance at selling the items I find not doing so?
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Polishing silver before selling

Tarnish on silver actually damages the silver. Most people agree that cleaning it is the proper thing to do. If left long enough it will eat the surface and leave pits.

 

A quick way to clean silver is to use boiling water, baking soda, and a strip of aluminum foil. It will save you hours of polishing. Simply boil the water, pour it into a glass bowl(a glass bowl is important) with a strip of foil and your item in the bottom, then add baking soda. A couple of tablespoons one at a time. Do it in the sink as it will bubble and fizz when the baking soda is added. Let sit a few minutes. The tarnish will just fall off and what is left will wipe away with a cloth easily.

 

I use this method with valuable silver watch cases and it is very safe and effective. You may wish to do a light polish afterward to give it a little shine but you will not have to spend hours trying to remove heavy tarnish and damaging detail in the process anymore.

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Polishing silver before selling

Silver should be polished but I wouldn't recommend the above method.  Antique silver should show some tarnish in crevices and the glow of a proper polishing with a good product. 

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Polishing silver before selling

The method I described is the best way to clean silver and retain any original engraving or design that I have ever found for heavily tarnished complex pieces. We restore hundreds of antique silver key wind watches a year and I use this method several times a week.

 

Any polishing removes a certain amount of silver and when you are looking to remove thick tarnish from an item that has not had attention in 100 years you will remove silver and consequently detail with any rubbing method and have a very difficult time accessing the crooks and crannies. The watch shown in the attached picture is a Civil War Era Waltham Ellery that was tarnished to the point of verdigris with a certain amount of loss of detail from being carried before we restored it . I lost no additional detail on the engraving with this method.

 

We do buff very, very lightly with jewelers rouge to shine a bit after the dip.

 

 

It is sad to see an engraved watch that a knowledgeable person can tell from the condition of the hinges has hardly been carried but the engraving has been practically polished and buffed off completely by someone attempting to remove a heavy layer of tarnish. Once removed by overzealous polishing the silver can never be added back to a prized piece, particularly a piece with engraving.

 

 

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Polishing silver before selling

More examples of silver watch cases cleaned with the baking soda method.

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Polishing silver before selling

 
Message 6 of 31
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Polishing silver before selling

Your watches look very nice but chemical cleaning results in an etched surface that (as you pointed out) requires more buffing. I would suspect that the buffing with Rouge of an already clean (and etched) surface will result in more silver loss than hand cleaning alone. Try your method on some feable silver plate, hand buffing one side and dipping the other. The resuls should make the best option obvious.

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Polishing silver before selling

It is not chemical cleaning, rather a reaction, and it does absolutely does not etch the surface. It is explained rather well in the following link:

 

http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/homeexpts/tarnish.html

 

 The light buff we do afterwards on the outside is necessitated by the multitudes of fine scratches the cases have accumulated over the years, not by any etching caused by the cleaning.

 

The attached picture of the interior shows the silver untouched after the process. We do nothing to the interior after the dip.

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Polishing silver before selling


@verybrad wrote:

Silver should be polished but I wouldn't recommend the above method.  Antique silver should show some tarnish in crevices and the glow of a proper polishing with a good product. 


That is absurd

HINC HVMILIBVS VENIA


HINC RETRIBVTO SVPERBIS















MISERICORDIAS DOMINI IN AETERNVM CANTABO AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM
Message 9 of 31
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Polishing silver before selling


@basi_lynd wrote:
Hey everyone, I've made it a hobby this year of going around to the thrift stores and estate sales looking for treasures and I recently began picking up silver items to sell on here. I think I made a mistake with my first two by cleaning them up with some polish. Should I clean the tarnish/patina off before listing or would I have a better chance at selling the items I find not doing so?

Shiny things sell better then dull, scratched up silver, in most cases dilapidated will yield nothing more then a silver paper weight when properly melted in sand, then one can call it a silver nugget paper weight, they sell.

HINC HVMILIBVS VENIA


HINC RETRIBVTO SVPERBIS















MISERICORDIAS DOMINI IN AETERNVM CANTABO AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM
Message 10 of 31
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Polishing silver before selling

Generally, items in original, as-found condition can attract a significantly higher price than items which have been zealously over-cleaned or inexpertly "restored".

 

 

'First, do no harm." now where have i heard that before? 😉

 

 

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Polishing silver before selling

*It is not chemical cleaning, rather a reaction,...*
 
Baking soda, aluminium foil & water with heat is exactly what a chemical cleaning involves. How do you know what is going on at a molecular level when you are boiling  the chemicals and pouring it over the varied tarnished silver? Keep in mind there are different silver formulas 800, 925, 935, 950, that have been used over the years.

 

*The light buff we do afterwards on the outside is necessitated by the multitudes of fine scratches the cases have accumulated over the years, not by any etching caused by the cleaning.*

 

Your link does not even mention how all this affects antique silver. Multitudes of fine scratches are going to take more than a light buff to make them go away. Unless you are using a wheel; please tell me you are not using a wheel. Also, what chemical are you using to get the black back in the crevases after the chemical cleaning?

 

All of this reminds me of a thread from years ago where an alleged expert/dealer was giving advice on cleaning valuable antique schrimshaw and he was telling novices that it was OK to use fine sandpaper to clean up dirty antique scrimshaw.

 

As with any antique, the least invasive approach is the safest. From what I see here, the watches look a bit overcleaned. If they were brand new, they look great, but if antique, they are just too slick in my opinion.

 

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Polishing silver before selling

The black present in the engraving on the watches pictures is the original stain that the engraver used over 100 years ago to highlight the engraving. The  process does not remove it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Message 13 of 31
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Polishing silver before selling

A couple of thoughts.

 

If the boiling hot  chemical solution poured over the silver object is strong enough to *get rid of the green tarnish & pitting *, then how can the original *stain* not be affected? Sounds like magic.

 

There were a number of points in your other post that I cant seem to find now that I wanted to address. So, what all this is reminding me of is that TV show called American Restoration where objects come into their workshop and instead of conserving the original surface, they do everything they can think of to strip / clean that old surface away and then polish and/or repaint. There are many people that believe that what they do on that show is A OK and what you should do to *restore* an antique.

 

However, in stripping away an old surface, you strip away the history of an object and the story it can tell of how it came through time. Agree that some watches could do with a very light polish, but dunking every watch into a boiling chemical bath and then buffing away the history of small scratches is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Polishing silver before selling

I never said it got rid of pitting. I said that I have found pitted surfaces caused by tarnish. Tarnish left unabated for many years is damaging to the surface of silver.

 

The process is not drastic. It is a bit of a science trick that transfers the tarnish to the piece of aluminum foil. When finished the aluminum is dull with tarnish that has transferred from the silver. It is not a harsh chemical bath as you are trying to make it out to be. It is just baking soda and water with a strip of foil in it.

 

It does not have a strong stripping quality to it in regards to stains, finishes, etc. It simply affects the sulfur that causes the tarnish. As I stated the original stains applied by the engraver is indeed left intact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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