Items that contain the most gold by weight are those that are made from 24-karat gold or are as close to pure gold as possible. However, these items might not be very common due to the softness of pure gold. (Pure gold is 24 karats, but it's very soft and malleable, making it less suitable for jewelry that needs to withstand daily wear.)

Your son or daughter will graduate high school or college in a few weeks. And you’re thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I gave that grad an old item of family jewelry that’s been sitting around for years?”

It could be grandpa’s old gold pocket watch, or a wedding ring that once was worn by your mother. Well, aren’t you being generous? Yes, you are. But before you make that generous gift, here’s a piece of advice:

What are the latest techniques in metal testing to be sure you are getting full value?

One thing for certain is that the old-fashioned kind of test that you have probably seen performed – the one where you rub a piece of jewelry on a stone and then drip some testing fluid on it, wastes a small quantity of precious metal. Why? Because in order to do the test, you have to rub off a quantity of that metal, you cannot reclaim it.

Marie Antoinette apparently wore a lot of jewelry. When you jump ahead to our century, you see that gold has hardly lost its popularity among celebrities. A few decades ago, Mr. T of The Mod Squad wore huge gold necklaces and medals.

Although you might think that the current cancellation of big-scale social events like the Met Gala have driven celebrities indoors, current new stories reveal that today’s A-List celebrities are still wearing a lot of gold jewelry when they go out and about, even just to buy a bag of bagels on the weekend.

Today is an especially good time to make money by refining older pieces of jewelry that were crafted in white gold.

Why? Here’s a bit of history that could come in handy if you are interested in making money by reclaiming and recycling gold scrap . . .

A client of ours recently found an interesting piece of gold jewelry. It was a brooch, probably more than 100 years old, that he found in an estate sale. He bought it for $40.00, took it home, and tested it using a gold testing kit.

What are the best places to find huge quantities of precious metals?

How to Avoid Myths and Mistakes

Many answers are flying around to that question. Unfortunately, many of those answers are just plain wrong. In today’s post, let’s take a closer look.

We recently spent a few hours in the company of an expert jeweler, looking through a batch of old jewelry scrap. It was amazing to watch him work. He seemed to have a kind of sixth sense about what he was looking at. He picked up a small chain and said, “This is solid gold.” Then he looked at an old watch and said, “The case is gold plated, not worth much.” Then he looked at a ring and said that although it looked like platinum, it was base metal that had a thin level of chrome or other bright-metal plating applied to it. Again, not worth more than a few cents.

Since ancient times, jewelers have been creating rings and other pieces of jewelry by pouring molten metal into molds. What methods did they use? Have any new methods have come along? It’s a fascinating subject that you should understand if you invest in precious metals. In today’s post, we’ll take a closer look.

Shakespeare once wrote, “All that glitters is not gold.” If he had thought about it, he could have written something similar about silver, platinum, rhodium, and other precious metals. The fact is that some shiny things that look like they should be worth a lot of money really aren’t. They either don’t contain any precious metals at all or they contain such small quantities that there is no point sending them to a qualified precious metals refinery like Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners, because the cost of extracting those metals will be greater than the value of the metals themselves.

We’re going to crawl out on a limb today and state our opinion that karat gold jewelry scrap is probably the biggest and best source of recyclable gold. Why do we think that? Because you don’t have to go panning in the Yukon to find jewelry scrap or (in most cases) hike around fields with a metal detector. Karat jewelry gold scrap is a lot easier to find than that, as the following stories illustrate. 

Do you have a quantity of jewelry pieces – findings, bits of chain, clasps or pins, perhaps – that you suspect might be valuable karat gold jewelry scrap? Or how about an old coin or piece of bullion that might, or might not, be pure karat gold?