new to refining bought some melted ingots

[Claudie]

RE:
154+ g Melt Ingot Bar Gold Plated Telecom & Computer pins PM Refining & Recovery

Do people pay $192.49 USD for 154 grams of pins? Why does melting them into a bar add so much to the value? It's the same thing either way. The pins would be much easier to process though.

 

[joem]

RE:
154+ g Melt Ingot Bar Gold Plated Telecom & Computer pins PM Refining & Recovery

Do people pay $192.49 USD for 154 grams of pins? Why does melting them into a bar add so much to the value? It's the same thing either way. The pins would be much easier to process though.

In a the most simple but the most complicated to understand words:
ebay Gold

 

[goldsilverpro]

RE:
154+ g Melt Ingot Bar Gold Plated Telecom & Computer pins PM Refining & Recovery

Do people pay $192.49 USD for 154 grams of pins? Why does melting them into a bar add so much to the value? It's the same thing either way. The pins would be much easier to process though.

It's always been a puzzle to me how anyone would be stupid enough to buy these things. Like you say, they have the same value as the pins (or, whatever) that were melted - no more, no less. How often do you find pins that are worth $567/pound?

 

[kkmonte]

But when they are melted together they look real Perty...

 

[MysticColby]

What is an assay exactly? I've seen the term used on here before

an assay will tell you the purity of the material. there are several types, and all of them have different difficulty, time, and precision.
the most basic is an acid test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_test_%28gold%29) - scratch the item on a stone, apply a drop of a specific acid, see how it reacts, apply another drop of another acid, see how it reacts. this will tell you if the gold is approximately 10k or 12k or 20k or w/e. maybe 10 minutes tops.
fire assay is pretty high precision, but takes somewhere around a couple hours. depends on what you're testing for, but it's a series of weighing, melting, dissolving, precipitating, melting, weighing. sort of a (weight_before)/(weight_after) thing.
then there's XRF. takes seconds, no material is lost in the testing, usually very high precision (like it can tell you 94.4% gold, 3.5% silver, 1.1% platinum, etc.) but it costs a lot to buy the device

 

[solar_plasma]

Offtopic:

Some threads remember to Jack Londons descriptions of the gold rush, when people who hardly new to handle dogs thought, they just had to sell everything, buy a slay and some dogs and rode out into the wilderniss without even warm clothes.

Well, they had no internet and no GRF, so there is hope today.