Silverlocks

1887 Boehm (Jubilee) Victoria Sovereign This is in excellent condition, a comfortable EF with a large portion of the original mint finish intact, and very little wear on the detail. Taken with axial lighting.

I've tried a few solvents, notably: Acetone - dissolves most grease based gunge. It's also miscable with water so you can rinse coins in distilled water if desired. Isopropyl Alcohol - Acetone is better, IMO, but this works. Limonene - This is degreasing agent widely used in cleaning electronics. It's the orange smelling stuff you use to clean heatsink gunk off CPUs, for those familiar with it. It works, but it's very, very smelly and has no discernible advantages over acetone. Ammonia solution - Probably the strongest cleaning agent for grease based stains; you can rinse coins off with distilled water. It won't react with silver or gold, but it will form cuprammonium complexes from copper salts. I've never tried it with copper coins. I got a little borosilicate petri dish and lid off Ebay. This lets you immerse a coin with about 10ml of solvent and pop the lid on it (good for anything that produces fumes). I also got a 10ml pipette for transfering solvents into the dish. Usually soaking in acetone and/or ammonia solution for a few minutes is enough to dislodge most gunge and bring the coin up nicely. One thing I did consider is getting a water pik toothbrush for rinsing and using distilled water for the rinse.

1915 George V Sovereign Acquired a few days ago. Nice EF with most of the original finish intact, but one or two significant handling marks and scratches.

1872 Sovereign Axial lighting, but with a less diffuse source. Looks rather more crisp and less flat.

1881 Young Victoria Sovereign (shield reverse)

That dates you. I'm no spring chicken and there are quite a few folks on this board who are substantially older than I am. Folks who remember the 1960s, which apparently means that you didn't really participate in them.

Original - he's quite old and semi-retired now.

The distribution isn't skewed as far as I'm aware.

I wondered about that - Lawrence Chard is fairly active on social media these days, which is where I heard of Chards from. You can see him pop up in The Silver Forum from time to time and they put out a bit of content on YT.

Is that the same outfit as Chards?

There's a saying that goes: Think how dumb the average person is. Now, remember, half the people are dumber than that.

That's a really nice obverse on that one. Mainly I'm into sovs, but getting any Jubilee Vic coin where she doesn't look like a kewpie doll is a win.

Gorgeous Georges - 1913 George V Sovereign

Gorgeous Georges - 1912 George V Sovereign

Gorgeous Georges - 1911 George V Sovereign