Licking a shell is not going to tell you anything except how it taste, I use a chloride test kit from LaMotte laboratories. They have also a meter that I really like. But you have to check the shell in water after it has soaked 24 hours and reached an equilibrium. Kinda hard to do that at a show or a relic shop, and if the shell is coated you won't get a reading anyhow. It has to be done on bare metal in water. One other thing, try to display them in a controlled environment, not in the garage, not on the front porch(where my wife thinks I should put mine) and not right beside a heater a/c vent. You can allways put them back in electrolysis, but that is only good if there is a lot of salt still in. Usually if it spiderwebs it's fixing to do what it will do and electrolysis won't help much. Thanks for the kind word Mike, sorry about the 6.4, that breaks my heart too. I got an Eason shell at Charleston last year in a trade,and the guy said that it might have should have been run through electrolysis because it had a crack. He was right, when I put the juice to it the whole outer layer fell off. Turns out it was a marsh shell, they are the worst to deal with.