After you’ve dug up some treasures metal detecting and taken them home, you might be wondering how to clean your steel pennies.
If you’re sure your steel penny is worth nothing more than its face value, then go ahead and clean it. Cleaning steel pennies is really easy. You can get them looking shiny and new again.
How to clean steel pennies

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The safest and simplest way to clean steel pennies is to use a cotton swab/cotton bud and olive oil. That’s it! The great secret revealed.
Leave your penny to soak in the olive oil in a dish for a few minutes. To reduce scratching, roll the cotton swab across the penny by spinning the swab between your fingers. It won’t stop 100% of scratching but will reduce how much the surface is scratched.
Another method is to use a Dremel rotary toolDremel rotary tool at its slowest speed and with its softest buffing wheel together with a soft scrub cleanser (but without bleach). If you’re using a Dremel, be careful not to wear away the detail on the coin.
Removing the zinc coating from a 1943 steel penny
When the US joined the second world war, copper became so in demand, steel was used to create pennies, hence the steel penny. To stop the coins from rusting, a zinc coating was added. If you have steel pennies with a kind of grey coating on them, that grey coating is zinc oxide and it means the coin is corroding. With zinc on steel, the corrosion can’t be arrested. You have to clean it off or it will continue to eat away at the steel.
The most expensive and complex method for cleaning rust off coins is via electrolysis where you immerse the penny in an electrolytic bath and hook a battery up to a special solution. See WikiHow for an excellent series of instructions for cleaning coins with electrolysis. It looks fun! TJ and I will have to try it one day.

Last modified: September 27, 2017
This is pretty amazing.Great technology used here to clean steel .Its very difficult to remove corrosion but this method could be very helpful . Gained a lot of knowledge.Thanks for sharing such great article.