This is really something the PAS (if they were doing their job properly) should be intervening over. Look at this numpty, bought some chemicals on eBay because he's heard its what the professionals use... no idea how to use them, what for - and also acetone vapour in a garden shed?? The guy looks sickly enough before he starts breathing that in. And it's not "crystals"....
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Metal Detecting UK - Artifact [sic] Conservation using Paraloid B-72
Terra Englandia .
"I am going to be applying it with cotton buds" (!) No! What a jerk. He's got a "Collekshun of bukles which I want-ter preserve" What actually needs "conservation" here? What does he understand by "preservation" one wonders? Making them shiny and plasticky it seems. Why not just dip them and drain them? Then he has a go at some Anglo-Saxon brooches (checked for preserved textile traces first under a binocular microscope no doubt before he begins rubbing cotton wool over them). Now could somebody in the UK explain to him and his viewers what Paraloid B72 is used for in general, and when to use it on excavated metalwork (and what should be done first) and when it should not be used.
Comments include:
Paul Broadbent Paul Broadbent 8 hours ago
The results look good.I use my daughters hairspray a tip I got off Markymark goes digging.
Border Searcher 18 hours agoHairspray, cotton buds. Disaster.
Great film and demonstrations on using the paraloid B72 ....been using hairspray recently and was pleased with the results but I'll be giving the paraloid B72 a go now aftwr seeing your results...thanks, keep up the great films mate👍🏼
Update: 14.05.2020
I see another metal detectorist does not have the courage of his convictions to stand by what he said and showed earlier. He's hidden his video. Terry Englandia couldn't be bothered to read any books on conservation, couldn't be bothered to ask a conservator, so he does not even know what the term (actually) means. He'd just read an advert about some magic wax to rub on coins to make them shiner- he's no idea what's in it and what it does to the corrosion layers, but his mates like shiny coins (and call it "conservation") so he rubs them with it and they shine. But then he heard that conservators use "crystals" of paraloid and ... that makes metal even shinier and that must be "conservation", right? So the more like plastic they look and the more you seal in all that moisture and instability, and the more you rub it and get those cute lil' old cotton fibres stuck all over it, the more it is "conserved" for "future generations". So he decides to make a video to show his mates, who'll start dunking, wiping, smearing, all manner of resins in all manner of solvents all over "their" dugup ancient metal objects to make them even shinier and even more "conserved".
And PAS will sit back and not react. Fifty days of lockdown they've had in which every day 41 people could have been looking out examples of bad practice such as this and reacting. They cant do much recording (they say) so what outreach could they have done using social media and their own, very own PAS forum? Well, this is one example where it does not take too much imagination to see that reaction by the PAS about 'best practice' was sorely needed.
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