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.

As people age, they tend to acquire a growing number of aches and pains. Yet if they have lived good lives, they often end up with something much more valuable . . .

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.”

If you have visited the Statue of Liberty or another tourist destination lately, you have noticed that hardly anybody is using digital cameras these days. Five years ago you would have seen all those tourists taking snapshots with small cameras made by Olympus, Sony, and other companies. Today, nearly all those pix are being shot using smartphones.

Where to Find Precious Metals in Your Local Junkyard

Where can you find platinum scrap, gold, and other precious metals in your local automotive scrapyard? Here’s a guide.

We have written a lot on our blog about the most common places to find platinum scrap, including catalytic converters, lab equipment, and thermocouples.

We have written on this blog before about retrieving gold scrap from old computers. It is actually pretty easy to do, since you can see the gold, which is mostly found on the little pins that are on the edges of motherboards, printed circuit boards, memory chips - in the little pins that are used to plug those devices into surrounding contact blocks.

For today’s post, we’d like to put on our science fiction glasses and think about what the world could look like in year 2050. We admit that it is unlikely that all the following conditions will have arisen by then, but let’s consider them anyway . . .

Over the years titanium has been used mostly in aerospace and industrial applications, and with good reason. Titanium is nearly as hard as steel, but it weighs much less. It is extremely resistant to corrosion and wear. It resists deformation -  you are going to have to jump up and down pretty hard on a titanium ring or pipe to get it to flatten.

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.”

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.)