Ave!
Wow! I do love a firestorm, don't you?
The use of MSR on coins is not the discussion here, but rather on bronze artifacts.
Patina,
patina,
patina...yadda, yadda, yadda...blah, blah, blah. Of course, keeping the original
patina on any ancient Ae/copper coin or object should always come first. No one knows that more than I, believe it or not. That being said, let's move back to the subject of
Jupiter. Pay heed, perhaps you'll learn something.
Many of you preferred the 2nd photo. Well and all. But it was my mistake to not mention that after getting the statuette to this stage, I discovered that it was riddled with BD. What to do? I used a cotton swab to apply GG's BD Killer to the many effected areas, rather than immerse the entire object in order to preserve the rest of the original
patina. The BD
was cured, but it caused horrible-looking swatches of bright copper that left the statue looking like it
had a bad case of the measles...or worse.
At this point, our
only recourse to preserve and restore
Jupiter to any sort of sellable condition was to strip it off and re-patina. Zero
smoothing tools were used, btw.
Thanks 4to2CentBC for the link to Royal
Athena. It's a eye-popper! Too bad my little
Jupiter is missing
his arms and legs, huh? He'd fit right in with the others.
If any of you naysayers (Andrew, Andreas, et al) have taken the time to actually click the link, I wonder why none of you are complaining that these beautiful, five figure
antiquities are devoid of their original
patina, so are inherently worthless due to their lack of the aforementioned? Or do just think that they popped out of the ground in this condition? C'mon, please...I guarantee that all have been stripped, smoothed and re-patinated in one form or another, so get a life or try it yourself.
See below for more MSR Before/After photos -
In this case, a small (75mm/3 inch)
Egyptian Ae statuette that we received for restoration. The before picture is not exactly 'as received' - Sheri
had to remind to take 'before' photos a few days into the cleaning process. Honestly, when it was dropped off to [REMOVED BY ADMIN], I
had never seen such a mess of impossibly encrusted/corroded/crystalized/bronzed diseased piece of junk. The gaps between the arms were pretty much non-existent, trust me.
Once again, we used multiple MSR soaks and SBBBing just to get to where we could actually see what we were working with. Then a full soak in GG's BD Killer for the cure. FYI - there never was a
patina, just a mess. More MSR soaks, SBBB and a common scalpel to scrape down to the bare metal. (The horror!).
Once done, we could now see all the details: fingers, toes, eyes, skirt and even
his belly button! No 'smoothing'
tools were necessary. Applications of JAX Brown with a cotton swab, multiple coats
Ren Wax with buffing between, and finished. Apologies for the
poor 'finished' photo. In hand, this lovely piece of ancient
Egyptian history is beautiful and worthy of anyone's
collection.
Got any complaints? No worry, I have a thick skin. Do your worst.
Best regards,
Kevin