An important silver buyer -, page-33

Hi DF


RE tarnishing ...

I started buying silver (and gold) about 2001/2002 little by little. Back then it was comparatively very cheap ( eg Ag $250/kg in Aussie dollars ... and I stopped buying gold when it became too dear @ $ 650/oz Australian ).

Anyway, I had some silver buried in a garden from 2005 until early last year. Several pieces (each enclosed in a sock) when buried .... the socks had 90% disintegrated leaving the silver bare to 14 years of garden soil. Each of the few pieces was horribly blackened, tarnished which didn't improve with washing in warm water with detergent.

So - I read up .... and got a plastic/glass bowl, lined the bottom with several layers of alluminium foil, added hot water with several spoons of sodium bicarbonate, stirred and then put each ingot in this one at a time. It only takes a few minutes and the tarnishing is gone.

Biggest ingot involved was a 5kg bar (bought in 2003 for $1300 Australian) and I took a photo of it before treatment. I tried just last week to post the photo on this thread, but wasn't able to do so. I'll try again sometime soon.

That aluminium/bicarb trick is well worth reading up on - lots of Youtube demonstrations of it. ( I may later on find a link to one and post it jfi. )

cheers
dub