Damaged, Repair, Clean, Preserve Soviet Awards And Documents.

[Dave]

Am I wrong to get a very, very uncomfortable feeling in my gut regarding all this non-reversible meddling and mucking-about with awards? OK, maybe I just am too much of a purist?

What the recipients did to them is one thing, and part of their history. And that damage or even just that patina is also part of that history. What we do to them may just border on desecration?

Ed Haynes

Ed-

Since I feel that your comments are directed at me, let me first say that I am probably the last guy to EVER feel comfortable cleaning an award. I have discussed this at length with other collectors who believe that it's okay to clean awards (one case in point was very advanced Soviet collector in fact, who is a great guy, but felt that he SHOULD polish all of the awards when he got them... I can't tell you how many of his groups I've passed up, just becaused they were "gleaming".)

For this thread, however, I did this for an educational experiment for the benefit of the people on the board. While I did feel bad about taking the original patina off the award, what other thing would I have used to demonstrate the application of a chemical patina on? Everything in my collection belonged to SOMEONE, and it's pretty tough to find sterling silver awards that are newly produced.

Anyway, I feel that the experiment was a valuable one, and that I learned a lot from it. Hopefully others on the forum will be able to use what I found out here to either restore awards, or identify fake/altered awards with a chemical patina.

--Dave