You can find the answer on the Mohs Scale

Is silver more resistant to scratching and wear than gold is? And how does platinum compare to them both?

What will happen to precious metal prices if a trade war causes a number of countries, including the U.S., to charge heftier tariffs on imported goods?

We recently spent a few hours in the company of an expert jeweler, looking through a batch of old jewelry scrap. It was amazing to watch him work. He seemed to have a kind of sixth sense about what he was looking at. He picked up a small chain and said, “This is solid gold.” Then he looked at an old watch and said, “The case is gold plated, not worth much.” Then he looked at a ring and said that although it looked like platinum, it was base metal that had a thin level of chrome or other bright-metal plating applied to it. Again, not worth more than a few cents.

Do you have a quarter, a silver dollar or another coin that you would like to have made into a ring?

If so, you can quickly find a company that will refashion your coin into a ring, just by searching online. It seems that lots of people are starting businesses that do it.

You know what to look for when you are hunting for platinum and platinum scrap, right? You’re looking for platinum engagement and wedding rings, right? Or you might focus on floor and bench sweepings from factories where platinum jewelry was manufactured.

If you’re on the hunt for platinum scrap, you could sweep the floors at a jewelry factory, pull up old drain pipes and floorboards you find there, or tweezer out bits of old platinum screens and sponge from plating tanks and drains.

That’s hard work. There are much easier places to find platinum . . .

Platinum is used in jewelry, thermocouples, catalytic converters and many other places.

That should mean that it is easy to find bits and chunks of platinum scrap that we can recycle profitably for you, correct? Well yes, there is a lot of the metal out there waiting for you to discover. But you must know where to look.

We enjoyed “10 Most Famous Engagement Rings in History,” a post on the TheKnot.com blog. It offers entertaining descriptions of 10 of the most jaw-dropping engagement rings ever given. One was a Van Cleep & Arpels engagement ring that JFK gave to Jacqueline Bouvier. It boasted both a 2.84-carat emerald and a 2.88-carat diamond. Not too shabby. Other astonishing rings are mentioned in the blog post too, including immense rings given to Mia Farrow by Frank Sinatra, to Marilyn Monroe by Joe DiMaggio, to Elizabeth Taylor by Mike Todd, to Beyoncé by Jay Z, and even to Queen Elizabeth II by Prince Philip. We can hardly keep up.

White gold is an alloy of gold and at least one white metal – sometimes more than one. Those additional metals could be nickel, palladium, or zinc. Sometimes a little copper is added too, to make the alloy less brittle and easier to shape. But only a little copper can be added, because if you add too much of it to gold, the resulting alloy becomes pinkish in hue. (That’s where so-called pink gold comes from.)

When we answered our phone a few weeks ago, a very nice gentleman told us that he had collected more than 1,000 used printer cartridges that he wanted to recycle. “How can I send them to you to be processed?” he asked. We had to give him the bad news that print cartridges do not contain precious metals. We explained that some of the ink they once contained might have contained tiny quantities of silver, and that some ink cartridges have circuit boards that contain extremely small quantities of gold - but that even in the best of circumstances, he didn’t have enough of any precious metal that we could profitably extract for him. We suggested that he take his cartridges to an office supply store that participates in manufacturers’ recycling programs.

A customer called us recently and asked, “Can you still make money by recycling computers now that the age of desktops seems to be over? It’s not worth recycling laptops, is it?”

We love the convenient shipping that Amazon and other online retailers are offering these days. You place an order and before you know it - sometimes on the same day - a box lands at your door. It’s great, but is the convenience making us overlook the security issues?

We found it at the bottom of a small bin of metal scrap that a client had sent to us for analysis. It was a little piece of gold-toned metal, about half an inch long. It was shaped like a barrel, with ribs running along it from end to end. We thought it was a bead, but it didn’t have a hole running through its middle - the kind of hole that would enable it to be used as part of a necklace. Our best guess was that it was part of a larger piece of jewelry - something that had fallen off a brooch or maybe even a tiara. There were no karat markings or other identifiers, so we figured it was made of base metal that had been covered with a thin plating of gold. But what the heck, we tested it and discovered that it was, in fact, made of 12-karat gold.

We have already written on this blog about strange things that have been made from precious metals over the centuries. (See “Be On the Alert for Strange Objects Made from Precious Metals,” a blog post we published on November 16, 2016.) In that post, we wrote about sterling-silver prosthetic noses, gold-plated iPhone cases and other oddities.

If you have an elderly relative who is about to enter a nursing home or assisted living, chances are you are already working with a counselor who is helping you deal with their financial assets. Today’s post is not meant to serve as a substitute for the expert advice you can get from those counselors, who know the ins and outs of Medicare and other factors that can impact on financial planning for elders.

If you do some searching online for “best places to hide precious metals,” you will find dozens of articles that offer advice on the smartest places to hide precious metals in your residence.

In the early days of 3-D printing, it took several steps to “print” a metal part. If you wanted to print a gold ring, for example, you had to follow these steps . . .

Do you have gold, silver and other precious metals that you would like to store safely away? If so, what are your most secure and loss-proof options?

In today’s post, we’ll discuss some of the popular storage places people choose for precious metals and explore what is good and bad about them.

“EPA Allows Mine Company to Pursue Permits Near Alaska Bay,” an article that Becky Bohrer wrote for the Associated Press on May 12, reports that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of approving a permit for a new copper and gold mine in the Bristol Bay area of Alaska. According to the article, that region produces half of the world’s sockeye salmon. The article reports that the area is also home to a fervent group of environmentalists who vehemently oppose opening a new mine in their pristine area.

If you’ve visited the lightbulb aisle at a home superstore lately, you know a big change has taken place. The old incandescent light bulbs that people used for decades have disappeared and been replaced by a variety of new bulbs, most commonly Compact Florescent Lightbulbs called CFL’s, that work much differently from old incandescent bulbs.