yaxthri
Bronze Member
- Nov 17, 2010
- 1,063
- 724
Actually this should go under "The day before yesterday's finds".
Helped a friend doing a cleanout of the cellar/workshop at his grandparents' house that he's now renovating to live in.
A lot of junk was in there, hadn;t been cleaned-up for at least 30 yrs and for more then 70 yrs stuff and dust was accumulating in there.
We completely demolished the tiny workshop's working bench and shelves, sorted out all old rusty tools and spare parts (2 large bags of scrap metal of all sorts is going to get recycled except for some memorabilia I got as "payment" for my help and that will go into my personal vintage tool collection) and got rid of all rotted wooden planks and asbestos plates.
While ripping down the old shelves I picked up two objects, a key-fob type thing and a coined that was nailed onto the side board. Both black and green from dirt, dust and insect droppings and thought to check them out back home.
After I got home with a small crate full of "fresh" old junk I picked up the fob thing and on the backside a saw a silvery shimmer. I decided to put it over the night into a special silverware/jewelry cleaning solution I use. I threw in the coin as well, had a suspicion for that one, too.
Due to all my excitement I sadly forgot to take any "before" pictures to compare with the final result that looks great I think.
After rinsing off the solution and a lot of toothbrush brushing (with extra whitening toothpaste with microparticles) I saw what I had found: a fantastic silver key fob, a replica of an Alexander the Great coin (no markings on it but even the small chain is solid siver, final link is cut through) and a (what I thought at that time*) silver 1926 (1930 special edition marked "B") One Drachma coin with godess Minerva's head on one side!!
I decided I had to return these to their rightfull owner, my dear friend and best man that is.
Maybe the coin had some special significance for his grandfather, a good-luck charm, maybe his first money earned while settling down in Greeceafter after fleeing his Asia minor homeland during the Turkish pogroms against the Greeks and other minorities... Who knows, my friend doesn't but he was really happy to get these thing handed over by me.
With my TNet inspired methodology I made sure everything, every old piece of furniture, box, crate, container, picture frame, book was thoroughly inspected, checked and taken appart before getting tossed out, so we found some other nice old things, too, no hidden gold though...
I kept the brass cross, aliminum cuff link and 10 Lepta coin and the nice old needle case with acorn shaped screw-on top (with some glass head hatpins still inside) also shown in the pics and the old rusty tools (they have a lot of work to get to be display pieces...).
*Doing some research on the inernet I found out the one Drachma coin is not really silver but a copper/nickel alloy... too bad, would be a sweet find. But I learned that my silverware cleaning solution works on nickel coins, too
All in all a nice weekend hunt!!
Helped a friend doing a cleanout of the cellar/workshop at his grandparents' house that he's now renovating to live in.
A lot of junk was in there, hadn;t been cleaned-up for at least 30 yrs and for more then 70 yrs stuff and dust was accumulating in there.
We completely demolished the tiny workshop's working bench and shelves, sorted out all old rusty tools and spare parts (2 large bags of scrap metal of all sorts is going to get recycled except for some memorabilia I got as "payment" for my help and that will go into my personal vintage tool collection) and got rid of all rotted wooden planks and asbestos plates.
While ripping down the old shelves I picked up two objects, a key-fob type thing and a coined that was nailed onto the side board. Both black and green from dirt, dust and insect droppings and thought to check them out back home.
After I got home with a small crate full of "fresh" old junk I picked up the fob thing and on the backside a saw a silvery shimmer. I decided to put it over the night into a special silverware/jewelry cleaning solution I use. I threw in the coin as well, had a suspicion for that one, too.
Due to all my excitement I sadly forgot to take any "before" pictures to compare with the final result that looks great I think.
After rinsing off the solution and a lot of toothbrush brushing (with extra whitening toothpaste with microparticles) I saw what I had found: a fantastic silver key fob, a replica of an Alexander the Great coin (no markings on it but even the small chain is solid siver, final link is cut through) and a (what I thought at that time*) silver 1926 (1930 special edition marked "B") One Drachma coin with godess Minerva's head on one side!!
I decided I had to return these to their rightfull owner, my dear friend and best man that is.
Maybe the coin had some special significance for his grandfather, a good-luck charm, maybe his first money earned while settling down in Greeceafter after fleeing his Asia minor homeland during the Turkish pogroms against the Greeks and other minorities... Who knows, my friend doesn't but he was really happy to get these thing handed over by me.
With my TNet inspired methodology I made sure everything, every old piece of furniture, box, crate, container, picture frame, book was thoroughly inspected, checked and taken appart before getting tossed out, so we found some other nice old things, too, no hidden gold though...
I kept the brass cross, aliminum cuff link and 10 Lepta coin and the nice old needle case with acorn shaped screw-on top (with some glass head hatpins still inside) also shown in the pics and the old rusty tools (they have a lot of work to get to be display pieces...).
*Doing some research on the inernet I found out the one Drachma coin is not really silver but a copper/nickel alloy... too bad, would be a sweet find. But I learned that my silverware cleaning solution works on nickel coins, too
All in all a nice weekend hunt!!
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