anyone ever find scrap at goodwill?

[danny987]

Ever find some jewelery or flatware there?

 

[Harold_V]

In Utah, Deseret Industries, owned and operated by the mormon church, is the most popular second hand store. For years I purchased eye glasses for 25¢ pair, plus the odd piece of sterling. Before 1980, when precious metals went through the ceiling in price, such material wasn't considered as desirable. No one understood the concept of refining back then, nor were there buyers of gold and silver as there is today. As a result, the stuff was readily available and reasonably priced.

I remember, with a smile, stopping at a garage sale while I was traveling in Nevada. I asked the gal if she had any jewelry. "No", was her reply. Don't know why, but I asked her if she had any class rings. That rang a bell. She trotted in the house and reemerged with a well taped man's high school class ring, obviously that of a long past love.

"How much?", I asked.

"25¢", she replied.

"Sold!"

That was representative of the deals I could make back then.

Ahhh! Those were the days!

Harold

 

[Anonymous]

Most of the good stuff gets picked out before it hits the floor, anything that looks half decent they have it appraised by a local Jeweler. Whom I suspect is also purchasing the majority.

Maybe twice a year the store has a silent auction, mostly junk.

 

[qst42know]

Not one piece of jewelery shows up in my local GW store not even the costume jewelery. Though many of the empty boxes do. Some of the boxes are from prominent jewelers and would have held some quality pieces, other boxes are from big box stores with the little 10k or 14k tags still inside.

Granted many of these boxes would have been received empty, but for no jewelery of any kind to show up I suspect someone has quite a little shadow franchise going on around here. :evil:

 

[Chumbawamba]

Check the silverware bins. You occasionally find some gems

 

[Irons]

Last year I picked up a pair of antique gold-rimmed glasses at a garage sale and the year before a sterling Slver Victorian era dish that weighed a pound and a half. I just missed a Sterling Ash tray at a church sale. I picked it up and noticed the hallmarks but my brain told me I didn't need an ash tray. The guy behind me grabbed it as I set it back down on the table.
My best find so far is a Queen Ann pattern pewter tray from the 17th Century for a quarter.

 

[Chumbawamba]

Hey Irons!

I've been getting good at identifying and distinguishing the marks on the various mugs, trays and utensils that are currently high on my attention span when I visit the local thrift stores. Whereas before I wouldn't be giving them a second thought, more recently I've been timidly acquiring gold-rimmed glasses and mugs with the idea to extract the gold from them. Now, I have no great ambition that this is going to result in any amount of gold worth boasting over, but at twenty five cents a pop for a glass on average, it doesn't seem like such a bad bet. I just wanted to be sure that it's really gold on those glasses and not some gold looking paint, as my wife thinks it is (she laughed at me, but we'll see who gets the last laugh here

On that note, here is a mug that has the most "gold" on it that I've found so far. Something tells me this is a trick to make me buy cheap crap from Goodwill to help fund the many disadvantaged folks in this country, but the jury is still out. A quick stannous test with some scrapings from the bottom rim did not yield any clues. Either my SnCl2 is no good, or I did something wrong (99.9% chance it is the latter). I found similar mugs online ("Designed by Hickok", "Made in Japan" from the bottom of the mug were the search terms) but nothing that would indicate one way or another if it's real gold. This mug is ugly enough that I won't have any qualms about busting it apart to find out for sure I suppose an AP bath on the relevant pieces would be the way to go?



I've so far managed to find lots of silver-plated pieces, some eating utensils which I suspect might be pure Sterling, and the occasional gold plated utensils (one cake serving spade with "22K" plating that is heavily worn). Again, the plated items are probably not going to result in a huge yield of metal, but at the prices I'm paying for this stuff (and considering where silver is going in terms of paper currency) makes it an easy decision.

 

[butcher]

I recover gold from ceramics and glassware, using hcl/bleach, plating is very thin most of the time, so caution on purchase price.
you will find some marked in the karat gold plating.
you will find other metal platings also like silver.
on glass plating is usually so thin if held up to light you can see through it, it will look kinda green (base metal its plated on.
large plastic pan works to hold plates, best to save up dishe's till you get a pile of them, to save on chemical volume.

on plated silverware check with magnet before processing batch.

 

[Chumbawamba]

Hey Butcher.

Do you break up the items before soaking in HCl-Cl or do you leave them intact and simply submerge the gold-plated parts in the solution?

 

[butcher]

Most of the time leave them whole, finding plastic dish pan ect to hold the item, and save up till you I have enough items to justify volume of liqiud needed, most of the time the glass items, are donated back, but if you are just expirementing with a few items breaking them would use less acid volume, and they would fit smaller container, an intersting thing sometimes the material that they use to plate gold to the glass starts to plate out gold in solutions that sit quite awhile, when oxidizers and chlorine level fall low, I kinda thought these might make good plating solutions, if could learn more about them. or could be used in some type of gold cell?

 

[netseeker]

The Goodwill stores in the Dallas area have a weekly auction at a central location(their main distribution is guess) where they auction just about everything imaginable. I would assume this would be the case elsewhere but I don't know. It's a guessing game on what they have every week and whether they have anything worth scrapping but you never know and you might get lucky.

 

[Anonymous]

The Goodwill and Salvation Army stores around Northern VA don't have much in the way of gold or even electronics. (unless you want $5 VCRs or giant CRT TVs) Lots of silver items though, seems to be the unwanted metal of choice here.

BMag

 

[Irons]

Your Goodwill source for jewelry:

http://www.shopgoodwill.com/listings/listbycat.asp?catid=6

An end of Year gift. Happy New Year.

 

[Platdigger]

Thank You!
And a Happy New Year to you too Irons... 8)

 

[Irons]

Thank You!
And a Happy New Year to you too Irons... 8)

May you find many treasures, but don't forget that the greatest treasure is a happy home.

 

[resabed01]

I've been looking at various stores here with different degrees of success. I find the Goodwill stores here are priced high. We have a store chain called Value Village that has better prices but they are a for profit group so I try to avoid them if I can. I won't bother picking up any plated dishes/cups/glasses because I can usually find this stuff for free elsewhere. Paying one or two dollars for a plated item probably isn't going to be profitable. Anything karat gold is usually priced way over spot (yes, I do carry a scale) or picked over and long gone. I did find a homemade ring of twisted gold/copper/silver that was worth picking up. Lots and lots of plated jewelry can be found cheap if you're into processing that stuff.

One area I've had good luck in is silver. I spend some time sifting through the jewelry and it seems I always find some sterling worth buying. Carry a good magnifying lens, a magnet and a small pocket scale when shopping and it helps to know the spot prices too.
Good luck

 

[JRH]

I know of a freind of mine told me of his retired former employer who has built a silver stripping cell in a 30 gallon plastic drum. He is buying old silverplated items from the thrift stores and yardsales and stripping them in the cell. He is then taking the stripped copper items and buffing them on a polishing wheel with jeweler's rouge and reselling the polished copper items at the flea market for several times what he paid for them and is planning on recoverying the silver from the cell once it is saturated. :lol:

 

[Barren Realms 007]

I know of a freind of mine told me of his retired former employer who has built a silver stripping cell in a 30 gallon plastic drum. He is buying old silverplated items from the thrift stores and yardsales and stripping them in the cell. He is then taking the stripped copper items and buffing them on a polishing wheel with jeweler's rouge and reselling the polished copper items at the flea market for several times what he paid for them and is planning on recoverying the silver from the cell once it is saturated. :lol:

Ask him what kind of solution he is useing.

 

[JRH]

Ok I have got more details on the system that he is using. He has a 30gal. drum set inside of a 55gal. drum with a layer of sand in between. The double drum set up serves to keep the inner cell from buldging from the weight of the electrolyte, and also gives added protection in the event of a leak.
For an electrolyte he is using 2lbs of copper sulfate per 15 gallons of sulfuric acid. Power source is a 12volt battery charger. He is attaching a lead to the item he is stripping and the opposite lead to a copper pipe down in the solution. He did not say whether the SA was concentrated or battery acid. I have e-mailed him for a clarification on this.

 

[Chumbawamba]

Hi JRH.

Thanks for the write up. This is super easy and I've been getting a lot of plated stuff from thrift stores lately so this is perfect.

A couple questions I would want to know are is he using anything special for the leads or is it just the battery charger clip? And if so, I assume the clip isn't affected by the acid or acid/voltage combination? Because I assume it will have to be immersed in the solution to some extent. Probably a dumb question answered elsewhere already but I don't have time to go searching.

Thanks!