Why is my brass tarnishing?

[Gaius Colletti]

Update, I tried Moi's lemon juice suggestion after doing a little research on the internet, just on one of the more tarnished plates:


[attachment=3932]manicatarnish4.jpg[/attachment]

The lemon juice worked quite well, and i thoroughly wiped down the surface with a damp rag soaked with just water to ensure the lemon juice didn't linger overnight. I will say, the brass has sort of a whitish metal appearance, compared to some of my other brass pieces.

[attachment=3933]manicatarnish5.jpg[/attachment]

Ultimately some of the tarnishing, as evident by the above picture, near the edge where the plates overlap, could not be removed due to the location, but it is much less noticeable than the close up would have you believe. And it wasn't worth my goatskin leather soaking in lemon juice to try. Thanks again everybody, especially Moi.

Matt, maybe you can add this to your "Equipment tutorial" thread for an "All natural, and possibly historical way to clean brass"

[Magnus]

Will do. The parts that didn't come clean with the juice will probably need something akin to autosol or magic blue, or brasso.

[Vindex]

Certainly a natural solution although I'm not sure how much lemon juice would be avaialbel on the limes! (And in damp Northern Europe it was probably required more often than not!)

[M. Demetrius]

Lemon juice would probably have been rare in most of the empire, but vinegar was available all the time. Plain old white vinegar works just fine.

[DECIMvS MERCATIvS VARIANvS]

Actually it looks like my seg where my dog licked it -- he liked the nut oil Hibernicus had oiled it w/ and I walked in one day and was like WTF? Looked a lot like camouflage... Anyway...