WW1 Bullion Mystery Wings
OK--- This is for all you WW1 Wing Nuts - Several years ago I had a rather extensive collection of WW1 wings. Not to the level of many on this forum, but there were quite a few nice ones that included Brit, French, Italian, and US. The wings photographed below are from a "BOX LOT" with some WW1 discs and other collar emblems. The filled box was filthy with oily crap all over everything. These wings were on the bottom of the box. They had also been shellac'ed and were stiff as boards. You could not really see any detail of any of the wings. I consulted a PHD Chemist to find me a solvent that would dissolve shellac and not harm bullion. The answer came with a product that was used to clean pathology samples and highly flammable. The 3.5 inch wing cleaned to mint, but the 6 inche'rs did not do as well due to the heavy coat of shellac. These photos were taken after the smaller wing had been cleaned. I cannot find the post cleaning of the big boys and must be long gone by now. They cleaned to about 50% brilliant, but both had varying degrees of damage. I sent them to Duncan C. to get his thoughts as to why these 2 examples were so large. All that we could come up with was that they were salesman's samples, novelties, or purely a one off example. The shields were 3D and a soapstone material was used as the base for the bullion. Duncan said that he had heard of such examples but never had held any and that these had made his day. All three are in large wing collection today. - Too much explanation for sure, but kind'a neet.
DJ
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by Gary Cain
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