Make Money Selling Gold and Silver Plated Items

Gold Plated Items - There are several types of gold plated items. Plain gold plated items can have as little as one or two atoms of gold covering a base metal. These are generally marked HGE or GE, which stands for heavy gold electroplate and gold electroplate respectively. Both contain so little actual gold by weight that it does not pay to refine these items.

Another type of gold electroplate is called gold filled and is marked usually 1/20 12K GF. This is a very thick plating of gold and if you can come by a quantity of this you can make significant money by selling it to a gold refiner. 1/20 12K GF means that 1/20 of the weight of the item is 12K gold. This is a much higher proportion of gold content than gold electro-plated items. One troy ounce of 1/20 12K GF is worth $23 at today's gold price of $940 a troy ounce. 1/10 12K GF often found on pocket watches and eye glass rims has twice the gold content of 1/20 and therefore is worth about $46 a troy ounce.

I once purchased a jewelers box of eyeglass rims at an estate auction. It contained over five pounds of gold frames after the glass and plastic parts were removed. The gold content was worth $3,680. Since I paid someone to extract the gold for me and sell it, I still walked away with a $2,500 profit. Not too shabby!

A third type of gold plate used in the early 1900's is called rolled gold. This is made by sandwiching a layer of base metal such as brass between two thin layers of gold alloy. The resulting sheet metal is then fabricated into watch cases, pins, tie clips, money clips and belt buckles. The gold content of rolled gold items is about the same as that of gold filled items.

Today it is still easy to find gold filled items. Cross pens are often made with 1/20 10K, 1/20 14K and 1/20 18K gold filled. The higher the karat the more the pen is worth. An 18K GF Cross pen is worth almost twice as much as a 10K GF Cross pen.

Most computer circuit boards contain gold filled solder connections and printed circuit wiring. Old mainframe computers often contained over two troy ounces of pure gold per machine and many people made a living extracting the gold from computer circuit boards.

If you have or can acquire gold filled or rolled gold material, you can easily sell it on eBay if you want to avoid the messy process of extracting the gold yourself.

Silver Plated Items - At current silver prices of about $13 a troy ounce, it does not pay to extract silver from silver plated items. In his book Gold And Silver, 1980, by Oscar Branson, the Author extracted silver from 144 forks and spoons. The yield was about two ounces of pure silver (about $26) from 12 troy pounds of sliver plated flatware. That does not even come close to shipping and refining the silver. You might make a profit if you could collect several tons of silver plate and deliver it yourself to a refiner. However you would have to pay almost nothing to acquire all that silver plate. In fact the base metal under the silver plate would be worth more than the silver itself.

In summary if you have a source to get gold filled and rolled gold items in quantity, you might make a nice side income. However, leave the silver alone. It is just is not worth the effort.