The answer is the same as to your question regarding acid. The answer will be the same for ultrasonic cleaners, Coca Cola, heating coins up, using any number of other chemicals, tumblers, power
tools etc. Everything has been tried. There is no magic bullet to effortlessly clean coins. Only try cleaning uncleaned coins if you enjoy the
act of cleaning and accept that you won't ever see your
money again and will not get any collectable coins out of it. And by collectable I mean coins that you'd
still want in your
collection 5 or 10 years from now.
The most promising way to clean coins is to buy single coins that can be cleaned and clean them mechanically under magnification. But even then it's a labour of love. I have dramatically improved a few coins I bought but I have so many coins I could clean, that I could spend hundreds of hours on it. It's a nice skill to have but you really have to enjoy it. It's not a way to build a
collection and not a
wise way to spend
money. That by itself is not a problem, hobbies generally are a pleasant waste of
money. When I started collecting a little over 10 years ago, the Golden Age of Uncleaned coins
had been over for just a few years, then you could
still find the occasional interesting coin in an uncleaned lot. Now you spend
money on what, after cleaning, are a handful of mediocre coins,
money for which you could have bought the same number of coins in well above
average condition.
I don't mind spending a lot of
money on nice coins but spending a lot of
money and not having any nice coins to show for it is crazy.
If you're interested in information about CLR, rather than a rant, use the
forum search. These questions have all been answered several times before and some of these methods, despite not being magic bullets, have some very limited use in coin cleaning.
