On topic: Leave your old hardware the way it is, for historical reference. Off topic: Coins are so boring ;) (though they last and are dated; I admit I have used them myself, though). When I backfilled my excavations of a 3000 BC temple mound on the Peruvian coast, I put a basket-full of old shoes in first (the site was being used as the modern town's garbage dump). In another case, I dumped a load of washed and sorted shells in a pit at a village site, and put in a dated newspaper page. A few years later, another group re-excavated at the village, found the shells, but thought the newspaper was intrusive (there is a lot of site looting in Peru) until they happened to mention to me the "cache" of shells they found, whereupon I told them what had happened. -----Original Message----- From: Ethan Dicks [mailto:erd_6502@yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 10:17 PM To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Restoring classic kits we built way-back-when <snip> Specifically, I have several things <snip> that I made when I was a teenager. <snip> I'm debating re-soldering these items <snip> I took history and archaeology in school; <snip> When my advisor restored the bed of a large monochrome mosaic near Isthmia, he threw several modern coins into the concrete bed so that future excavators would know that it wasn't ancient concrete. <snip> -ethan