MIDAS said:
Some of those folks forget that gold is 9k - 23k that directly results in lower returns when refined. They think ALL gold is worth 650 or whatever spot is an ounce. Do some multiplication 14k is .583 x weight = your payout or 10k is .416 and so on.
Midas
That's based on all conditions being correct, and items made after changes in the gold marking regulations, time of which escapes me now, but it was in the late 1900's.
Prior to the change, law allowed for ± ½K for alloy variation, plus ± ½K for soldered items, accounting for solder that may be deviate from fineness for soldered items.
Consider graduation class rings. It was suggested that over a ton of gold was used annually in their manufacturing when they were routinely made of yellow gold. High school class rings were normally 10K gold, but rings from higher learning institutions were to be found in 14K gold.
Go back to the high school rings and consider a couple things. If a ton of gold was stretched, intentionally, by manipulating the karat fineness by substituting copper and silver for gold, considering it's alloyed by weight, not volume, the very heavy gold is replaced by much lighter elements---with a resulting stretch of volume of roughly 10%-----one hell of a lot of class rings in the scheme of things. The manufacturers short changed the buyer, but remained on the edge of legality in doing so.
I refined class rings by the pound and found the average yield to run every so slightly greater than 9K. That, indeed, would get someone's shorts in a knot if they expected a pound yield from a pound of scrap.
Folks like that always made me shake my head. Why would their gold need refining if it was already pure? If it isn't pure, why would they expect a return equal to the starting weight?
Dealing with uninformed people where gold is concerned is a difficult task.
Harold
