Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Back of Flat Button As Found. |
This button was found near the 54th Regiment of Foot and 76th Regiment of Foot buttons that I showed recently. It is a flat button with a gold wash or gilt. Much of the detail is obscured. There is no detail on the front, and the gilt is gone from the front.
As I've explained many times, be careful when you clean a coin or other item. Use the least aggressive or dangerous method that will do the job and monitor the progress very closely to prevent any damage. If you don't know for sure how to do it, it is better to wait.
Well, this is an example of not doing it right. I decided to clean this one, and decided to see how a quick immersion in acid would do. A very quick immersion would have been alright, but I put in the Muriatic Acid and forgot about it, leaving it in overnight. That was not good.
This is what happened.
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| Flat Button After Overnight Immersion in Muriatic Acid. |
As you can see some of the dirt came off but so did some of the gilt. That is a good example of what not to do.
You can now see the flourishes but the word ORANGE, which is at the top and bottom between the flourishes.
I've found gilded pieces tricky. You don't want to lose any gilding, but it can easily be damaged and removed.
I would not have even considered using the acid if the button was one of the better ones, but thought I could get away with a quick dip. Unfortunately it was more than a quick dip.
Aluminum Jelly or Naval Jelly is often recommended for use on buttons having gold or silver gilt.
The change in color on the above photos is due mostly to a change in lighting. I should have been more careful about that too.
Here is an article that will help you do it right. Additional methods are described including heated hydrogen peroxide.
Beside cleaning, buttons will often need some type of treatment for conservation. Pewter, for example, is fragile. When you find a pewter button the first thing to do is keep it moist.
After you properly clean it, then you need to protect it, otherwise the edges will start chipping.
If you look at the edges of the two buttons below, you'll see chips around the edges.
People often coat pewter buttons with a 50% mixture of Elmers glue and water or a thin cover of urethane.
Neither of the of the above have been cleaned or preserved yet.
I've learned many lessons the hard way and post them here so you won't have to repeat them.
I once did a post asking "Are you really ready for your big find."
Everybody is eager to make a big find, but there are many mistakes you can make when that happens before you are ready.
These were the first old buttons I found and I didn't have the knowledge or experience to treat them properly. If you are like me, you will make a lot of mistakes the first time you find different kinds of items. Here are some of the kinds of mistakes you can make.
1. Not carefully digging. You can easily destroy or damage finds during recovery. That can be very disappointing when you find out that the item was something especially nice.
2. Not identifying the item correctly. When an item comes out of the ground, it can tell you something important. Its age and quality might tell you that the area deserves more serious attention, but if you don't recognize the item, you can miss that important clue, or worse yet, discard an item that has more value or is more interesting than you recognize.
3. Not carrying the item safely. I broke some nice bottles while carrying them down the beach and lost a gold chain out of a hole in my shirt pocket. I walked back about a mile and refound the chain, but it was a lot of extra effort.
4. As I showed today, a nice item can easily be damaged by the wrong cleaning method.
5. After proper cleaning comes conservation.
6. You might also fail to record information about the time, location and other details of the find. Again, if you are like me, after a few years you'll discover that you wish you had done that.
For example, I just ran across some arrowheads I stored in a plastic bag. I had some information in the bag written on paper with the items. The paper crumbled and I can no longer read what it said.
More often, I never wrote down the information that I later wish I had.
7. Then there are legal, partnership and media issues that might need to be handled properly.
In summary,
if you don't yet have the knowledge or experience to deal with things well. there are a lot of things that can be done to ruin or diminish what otherwise would be a great find. In my case, it hasn't been anything huge, but there are many cases when I wish I had done things differently. Most of those happened early in my treasure hunting days, and many of them were "first" finds of a particular type.
Here is a nice web site showing a lot of button backmarks.
http://relicman.com/buttons/Button9900-Backmark-Index-PAGE2.html
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I asked people to send in photos of their Native American Treasure Coast beach finds, particularly points, but haven't received any yet. I know that people find them. On a couple occasions I've had tourist come up to me and show me an arrowhead they picked up. One of those was at Wabasso. A tourist staying at the Disney Resort showed me one she found and asked me about.
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I was so glad that the Medicare helpline helped Joe Nemeth. I could just see him hanging on the phone in his Tequesta home waiting for an agent to help him.
And Terry Bradshaw didn't do very well with his Weight Watchers program, but he got a walk-in bath.
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I plan to do some more posts on old buttons as well as Native American finds.
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No change in beach conditions is expected real soon.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
