Acid soils raise havoc with both copper and silver. Heavily fertilized lawns or lawns with large shade trees seldom produce good copper coins. Neither do manure-infested county fairgrounds. Silver coins are generally shiny when they come out of the ground. You can find some real beauties so you want to be careful when you dig. The looks of that 1916 Standing Liberty quarter won’t be improved by a digging dent.

One thing about a collectable coin that you yourself have found with a metal detector; it's not likely to be counterfeit. That 1909-s vdb found 6 inches deep in the old yard might be more likely to be the genuine article than similar condition coins from some dealer's stock. My search buddy's lead double eagle is the only counterfeit coin I recall having seen found.

Frankly, I feel that a pedigreed detector-located coin has an inherent intrinsic value that is special to the person that found it. As coin-shooters often keep journals detailing their yearly adventures; reliving the thrill of discovery with coin in hand is a real pleasure. As I will sell or trade duplicate coins and tokens, the buyer gets a short story relating where the coin/token was found with any historically significant information I can come up with. That's my way of passing on my personal thrill-of-discovery. Speaking of thrills, satisfaction can be defined as your inner feelings when of pulling a century old silver coin out from a soon to be paved over parking lot. The spot from which that 1894-s Barber half pictured above was dug had two feet of crushed rock on it an hour after the coin's rescue.

It goes without saying that you should never, never attempt to "clean" a collectable coin if you can possibly keep from it. Questions arise though, over just what is meant by "cleaning". To my mind, "cleaned" collector coins are ones that have been chemically treated, dipped, polished, or whizzed with intent to remove tarnish and create a misleading lustrous, "mintlike" appearance. "Cleaned" detector coins on the other hand, are those which have been treated to retard or correct corrosion and not those that have had encrusting dirt removed.

Technically speaking, most coin shooters "clean" a coin when it first comes out of the ground when we first wipe the dirt off to see just what we found. Human nature being what it is, the coin is immediately wiped off so we can see date and mintmark. That action may leave hairline marks that a coin-grading service would consider as evidence of old cleaning. Heck, I know of a Portland coin dealer whom I suspect that considers looking at a coin "cleaning" (That's only if you are trying to sell to him; some of his "uncleaned" for-sale stock looks as if it has encountered an industrial-strength buffer).