500lbs of junk gold plated jewelry

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pelican

New member
Joined
Mar 3, 2016
Messages
2
Hello everyone!

So I have accumulated hundreds of pounds of various costume style junk gold plated jewelry. I like to pick through bags of jewelry from thrift stores and swap meets or whatever and I always put any gold plated material to the side. I also sort gold filled, karat gold, silver etc but obviously the plated stuff gathers quicker by an order of magnitude.

For the past few years I have just been filling plastic bins and im up to nearly 500lbs. It is too much for me to attempt to recover and refine the gold content. I dont have the means or the space or quite frankly the tacit knowledge to pull off a large scale job, plus - many of the (reverse electroplate) video tutorials Ive watched and discussion posts from here are done in smaller household sized pyrex style dishes with a only few pounds at a time.

Can anyone throw some brain storming ideas my way? Do I find an online refiner who deals with both the public and plated material and ship it? Do some home hobbyists have large cells capable of this? Any advice is appreciated. Another possibility I read on a post from 2014 is to chunk it out in lots on ebay, but I am more looking to have the gold. I really have just been stockpiling this stuff havent found a solid lead on what to do.

Anyway thanks for reading if you made it this far. I really love this forum and the absolute trove of information. Especially Harold. His post are so authoritative, concise, respectful and flat out brilliant. The man has a way with words. Strong but fair. How I remember my grandfather. I picture him to look and sound like Lance Henriksen. I will leave a photo of one of my binfulls to get an idea. Thank you again you guys!!

Andrea S.
Tampa FL
 
Hello pelican,
My thoughts are you could most likely get more gold, by selling the scrap in batches on ebay and buying gold.

Some of the prices people pay for scrap on ebay does not make common sense, many times the bid will climb much higher than the real value or of the gold content...
 
I believe Butcher is correct here. Sell it for what people will pay for it. I've recently done a trial on a large batch of plated scrap jewelry and it didn't go well at all.
 
Ahh I was afraid of that !! Thank you for responding!

@Anachronism what happened with your trials??
 
They yielded horrible returns- it was wasn't worth processing at all. It showed how little gold can really be used to make a piece of metal look pretty.

Naturally this doesn't apply to all plated material but it certainly did with this jewelry. Sample size was approx 40Kg, and the yield was under 0.1g per Kg.
 
You also can have very troublesome metals like tin alloys of pewter....) to deal with which will tend to rob you of the small amount of gold, locking it up as colloids...
 
Most of this type of gold plate is a flash electro plate. That means a microscopically thin layer. You'd be amazed at how a few molecules thickness of gold coating will make something look gold.

When I was in the CD manufacturing business we would vacuum deposit gold on CD's, we measured how much in angstroms. We put 300 to 500 angstroms on the CD, which made it about 75% opacity. By comparison, a sheet of paper is 1 million angstroms thick. Very, very little actual gold on them, but they looked like solid gold to most people.
 
Gold plated on glassware can look thick by the reflected the light of its golden surface, but if you hold it up to the light you can see through the gold plating imparting a green view, (like looking through sunglasses).


Basically just like the gold plated on welding helmet lenses that reflect the light of the welding arc and allows some light through giving the welder a green view of the welding.
 
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