Have you ever sold an unwanted piece of gold jewelry to a jeweler or one of those “We Buy Gold” stores?

It’s a straightforward process. You walk in, the person behind the counter checks your item with a gold testing kit, and makes you a cash offer that you can either accept or reject on the spot. But in reality, the person on the other side of the counter is making a lot of calculations that he or she is almost certainly not sharing with you . . .

Finding a big gold nugget or other chunk of gold is every gold investor’s dream. And it does happen occasionally. It is far more likely that you will find small chunks of the precious metal – and likely that you will overlook some of them when you go hunting for gold in estate sales, antique stores, and even around your own house.

Way back in 1977, NASA launched its Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Both of them are now about 14 billion miles from Earth and, incredibly, both are still communicating scientific data back to NASA.

You go looking for gold and . . . you find some! Maybe you go to an antique store and find a piece of jewelry that looks like pure, shiny gold, but you find out later that it is only covered with a thin gold plating. Or you discover a gold nugget and find out that it is only a cheap collectible that has been created to look like the real thing, but isn’t.

What is an appliqué? It is a small decorative piece of silver or gold that is applied to another metal. The word appliqué is French, meaning “applied.” (An appliqué is also a piece of fabric that is sewn onto a garment as a decoration, but that is not the kind of appliqué we are writing about in today’s post.)

It’s no secret that vast numbers of computers are being discarded. According to some estimates, one million pounds of old computers are tossed out every year.

Are airplanes great places to look for gold, silver and other precious metals? Granted, the mechanical and electronics that planes hold often contain amounts elements of gold, platinum and silver. But tons of gold? Why would any plane contain that much precious metal?

Gold-plated and gold-covered items look beautiful - and they look expensive. But even though many collectible items have a beautiful surface of genuine gold, some contain only a tiny amount of the precious metal. Over the centuries, tiny amounts of gold have been beaten thin and used to decorate all kinds of items, even buildings.

Tariffs, Trade Wars, Shrinking Tech . . .What’s the best way to invest in scrap gold today?

We have to admit, we have never seen a period when it has been so difficult to pinpoint the biggest trends that will affect the prices of gold. In the past, there were periods of uncertainty when it was possible to consider just one trend, see how it was probably going to affect domestic gold prices, and formulate an investment strategy. You could say, for example, “Looks like trade relations with China are going to be rough for a while, there could be fewer gold crossing borders, so the price of gold that is already in the U.S. is probably going to rise.”

Have you heard that half of all marriages end in divorce? If you do a little research online, you will learn that statistic is not true. It seems that in about 1980, the divorce rate hit an all-time high of 40%, and is be declining today. That could be because more young people are skipping marriage - and if you don’t get married, how can you get divorced?

We watched the royal wedding. Did you?

And while we were caught up in the wonderful spectacle of two young people starting their married life together, we couldn’t help noticing that a lot of jewelry was on display too. (We assume that most of the gold and gemstones we saw were the real thing, given the wealth of the celebrities in attendance and the serious nature of the event.)

Where to find hidden gold and other valuables under fake bottoms

Over the years, people have devised some very clever ways to hide valuables. They have buried jewel boxes in their yards, painted diamonds black to disguise them, stashed gold under floorboards, and hidden jewelry in hollowed-out banisters and behind loose bricks in the basement.

Let’s face it. Engagements have a way of not working out and when they don’t, many women end up with a valuable platinum engagement ring. If you find yourself in that situation, what should you do with your old ring, which could be worth a lot of money?

Bling has been around for centuries. Marie Antoinette, members of the Russian Imperial family and all kinds of royals from past ages have loved to adorn themselves with shiny, oversized pieces of jewelry. They were apparently trying to send a message that said, “I can afford this stuff, you can’t, I am richer than you are, and you better be impressed.”

Back in his student days, our friend Joe was short of cash one month. So to pay his rent, he sold his high school ring to a jewelry shop on 47th Street in New York.

“I took it in, we struck a deal on price and before he even paid me, the guy behind the counter stuck my ring on a mandrel, grabbed a big hammer, and smashed the gem stone that was mounted in it. I left the store with some cash in my pocket, but I wasn’t feeling too great about the whole experience.”

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.

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 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.