We watched the royal wedding. Did you?

And while we were caught up in the wonderful spectacle of two young people starting their married life together, we couldn’t help noticing that a lot of jewelry was on display too. (We assume that most of the gold and gemstones we saw were the real thing, given the wealth of the celebrities in attendance and the serious nature of the event.)

Where to find hidden gold and other valuables under fake bottoms

Over the years, people have devised some very clever ways to hide valuables. They have buried jewel boxes in their yards, painted diamonds black to disguise them, stashed gold under floorboards, and hidden jewelry in hollowed-out banisters and behind loose bricks in the basement.

As people age, they tend to acquire a growing number of aches and pains. Yet if they have lived good lives, they often end up with something much more valuable . . .

Let’s face it. Engagements have a way of not working out and when they don’t, many women end up with a valuable platinum engagement ring. If you find yourself in that situation, what should you do with your old ring, which could be worth a lot of money?

Where to Find Precious Metals in Your Local Junkyard

Where can you find platinum scrap, gold, and other precious metals in your local automotive scrapyard? Here’s a guide.

We have written a lot on our blog about the most common places to find platinum scrap, including catalytic converters, lab equipment, and thermocouples.

Over the years titanium has been used mostly in aerospace and industrial applications, and with good reason. Titanium is nearly as hard as steel, but it weighs much less. It is extremely resistant to corrosion and wear. It resists deformation -  you are going to have to jump up and down pretty hard on a titanium ring or pipe to get it to flatten.

We enjoyed “10 Most Famous Engagement Rings in History,” a post on the TheKnot.com blog. It offers entertaining descriptions of 10 of the most jaw-dropping engagement rings ever given. One was a Van Cleep & Arpels engagement ring that JFK gave to Jacqueline Bouvier. It boasted both a 2.84-carat emerald and a 2.88-carat diamond. Not too shabby. Other astonishing rings are mentioned in the blog post too, including immense rings given to Mia Farrow by Frank Sinatra, to Marilyn Monroe by Joe DiMaggio, to Elizabeth Taylor by Mike Todd, to Beyoncé by Jay Z, and even to Queen Elizabeth II by Prince Philip. We can hardly keep up.

When we answered our phone a few weeks ago, a very nice gentleman told us that he had collected more than 1,000 used printer cartridges that he wanted to recycle. “How can I send them to you to be processed?” he asked. We had to give him the bad news that print cartridges do not contain precious metals. We explained that some of the ink they once contained might have contained tiny quantities of silver, and that some ink cartridges have circuit boards that contain extremely small quantities of gold - but that even in the best of circumstances, he didn’t have enough of any precious metal that we could profitably extract for him. We suggested that he take his cartridges to an office supply store that participates in manufacturers’ recycling programs.

We found it at the bottom of a small bin of metal scrap that a client had sent to us for analysis. It was a little piece of gold-toned metal, about half an inch long. It was shaped like a barrel, with ribs running along it from end to end. We thought it was a bead, but it didn’t have a hole running through its middle - the kind of hole that would enable it to be used as part of a necklace. Our best guess was that it was part of a larger piece of jewelry - something that had fallen off a brooch or maybe even a tiara. There were no karat markings or other identifiers, so we figured it was made of base metal that had been covered with a thin plating of gold. But what the heck, we tested it and discovered that it was, in fact, made of 12-karat gold.

“EPA Allows Mine Company to Pursue Permits Near Alaska Bay,” an article that Becky Bohrer wrote for the Associated Press on May 12, reports that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of approving a permit for a new copper and gold mine in the Bristol Bay area of Alaska...

Urban legends are stories – usually untrue - that are so weird that people keep repeating them and sending them around via email. They tend to take on lives of their own – some people even think they really happened. There are even urban legends about precious metals. Here are three we have heard…

It is easy to find businesses that are for sale. You will find them advertised in newspapers that are published near where you live. Plus, you can find hundreds of them online on BizBuySell.com and other online listings of businesses that are for sale. Just search online for “businesses for sale” and you’ll soon be looking at hundreds of them. 

If you’ve ever walked around an old industrial site hunting for precious metal scrap, you know that the search can be overwhelming. You examine heaps of dirt, piles of chemicals hiding in the bushes, old steel drums that contain dried or wet sediment, streams where chemicals and byproducts were once deposited, and all kinds of other places that could be hiding precious metal scrap. Although you cannot identify most precious metal scrap just by looking at it, here’s a quick visual guide to some of the materials that can often be refined profitably in our precious metals refinery.

It might interest you to know that the Greek philosopher Plato made some philosophical inquiries into precious metals. You remember Plato. He lived from about 428-348 B.C., studied with Socrates, and taught Aristotle how to think. In his famous book The Republic, Plato wrote that human beings, just like precious metals, come from the earth. He also wrote that human beings, like minerals, can be made of three different metals…

Only a few years ago, it was easy for crooks to sell items they had stolen – silverware, jewelry, firearms, what have you. They just drove to a pawnshop located some distance from where the crime had occurred and sold what they had stolen. The situation was bad for everyone…All that is now changing, thanks to new online databases of stolen goods

Before you hop in your car and go looking for precious metals at home sales, in open fields, at antique stores and the other common places visited by people who hunt for gold and precious metals, why not ask this simple question? Are precious metals hiding right under your nose, right there in your home? The simple fact is, they could be. Here are some places that should be on your radar… 

Will your gold, silver, platinum and other precious metals increase in value in the coming months and years? Will the demand for recyclable precious metals increase in 2017? There is no way to predict with absolute certainty. But here are some trends to watch.

Forty or 50 years ago, only people who owned airplanes could zoom over the earth, looking for sites likely to contain precious metals. If they found the location of an old church, factory, house or mine, they noted the location and then visited it on foot. Today, you can do it all online. 

In case you think that scrapped computers and other old electronic devices are hard to find and send to us to be recycled, we’d like to direct your attention to statistics that were recently reported in “Electronic Waste by Numbers: Recycling & the World,” an article that was posted on March 12, 2016 on ewaste.com. Every year, vast quantities of electronic waste are tossed away. Here are some eye-opening statistics…