Not long ago, a man found two 55-gallon steel drums full of gold paint. He was very excited and called us up.

“How much gold do you think they contain?” he asked.

Finding a big gold nugget or other chunk of gold is every gold investor’s dream. And it does happen occasionally. It is far more likely that you will find small chunks of the precious metal – and likely that you will overlook some of them when you go hunting for gold in estate sales, antique stores, and even around your own house.

There are many legends about people who decided to hide their treasures in wells. One of the most common tales is that at the end of the Civil War, wealthy southern families tossed their silverware down their wells to prevent roaming Yankees from finding it.

Gold, platinum, silver and rhodium are called precious metals because they are valuable. You already knew that! Yet some people toss them away anyway.

Here are some tips that can prevent you from literally giving them away without realizing it.

“Poison fears on 'Arsenic Avenue': Families forced out of their homes as studies find suburban street was built on toxic soil,” an article that appeared in Australia’s Daily Mail on September 6, 2018, points out all too clearly the health dangers that can result when people are exposed to poisons that are left behind near old gold mines.

In years past, it was relatively difficult to plate a bright, shiny new layer of gold or silver onto other items. To do it, you had to either immerse the items to be plated in a plating tank or, in some cases, use an electrified plating brush to apply a thin new layer of gold or silver.

Have you ever shopped online for miniature safes and other “safe spots” where you can hide gold, silver, platinum and other small valuables in your home?

If you have, you know that the variety of products you will discover is nothing short of amazing. When we did some online shopping recently, here are some of the products we discovered . . .

Gold is a yellow metal, right? So how does it get turned into white gold?

That is a common question about white gold. We’ll answer it in today’s post, along with some others.

Alchemists were medieval scientists who, legend says, were able to turn base metals into gold. Of course they couldn’t do that. Still, some of their discoveries are still being used today. One is aqua regia, a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acid that is still used today to dissolve gold and platinum.

What kind of precious metals do you own? Bullion bars or coins? A mixed collection of jewelry items you have picked up at tag sales and estate sales? A garage full of catalytic converters? A batch of old computers?

We recently found a bottle of “Platinum” skin cream on a shelf at a pharmacy store.

“Wow,” we thought, “they’re using platinum in skin cream?” But when we scanned a list of the ingredients that the cream contained, we learned that it did not contain platinum, only a bunch of chemicals, plant extracts, aromas, and coloring agents. But platinum? No.

If you want to spend a day hunting for precious metal discoveries, you could visit antique stores, dumpsters, your town dump, or an abandoned factory.

Let’s say that you have an old gold-plated set of silver tableware. As you know, the gold that the set contains is worth much more than the silver. Can’t you throw everything into a tub of some kind of chemical that will dissolve the silver and leave only the gold behind in solid form?

You might have heard rumors that the U.S. Government operates a secret program to recycle precious metals. That rumor holds that the government, unknown to U.S. citizens, is processing vast quantities of gold, platinum and silver.

Not long ago, we had a call from a man who had bought a box of 16 rolls of gold-plated jewelry chain at an auction where the assets of a closed jewelry manufacturer were being sold to the public. “I weighed the box,” he told us, “it weighs about 12 pounds . . . so what is it worth?”

If you are a regular reader of our blog, you know that we like to offer advice on where to find platinum, silver and gold scrap in old factories. So we thought it would be interesting and informative to profile one such building - the old Tiffany manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, that has now been converted to residential apartments. It is located at 90 Tiffany Boulevard - where else could it be?

Last month, a development firm from New York bought a vacant 50-acre manufacturing complex from Caterpillar in Milwaukee. And in the same month, the vacant 37,000 square foot Vista Pointe Industrial Plaza building in San Diego was sold to a California developer.  

Gold is a heavy element. A chunk of gold is, in fact, more than seven times heavier than a piece of marble or even granite of the same size. And when gold is in a natural setting, it can be more than 25 times heavier than the sand or soil that surrounds it.

Are airplanes great places to look for gold, silver and other precious metals? Granted, the mechanical and electronics that planes hold often contain amounts elements of gold, platinum and silver. But tons of gold? Why would any plane contain that much precious metal?

Copper is a metal with many wonderful and useful properties. It is soft and malleable. It is also a “friendly” metal that can be blended with many other metals to form alloys.

What precious metals are most often mixed with copper? And when they are, how does that affect their value? Let’s explore that topic.