Featured Question concerning gold-plate and scrapping

When I visit my favorite flea market, there is a friendly competitor that I encounter every week. Recently, he was all excited he found gold-plated watches. Is there any scrap value to gold plate? I saw the watches, they certainly were modern, not antique. I do pick up gold-filled pieces, but never thought of picking up gold-plate for anything but jewelry wear. Thanks.

 

You might get a little gold if you had 1,000+ pieces.

 

I watched a video on YouTube not too long ago of a guy who was chemically removing gold plate from old computer parts. I can't remember how I got linked to it or from where, but I watched the whole thing.

It's a long tedious, technical, toxic process that takes a lot of time, equipment and a safe space to work with all the toxic chemicals and dispose of them properly.

 

I watched the video too when I was getting ready to toss some old computers. Looked toxic to me too.

 

In short?

No.

Yes, gold-plate has real gold, but the gold is literally microscopic. You'd need thousands of pounds of gold-plate scrap before you got anything worth sending to the melter's for. Same for silver-plate. In my experience, the scrapper probably won't even bother touching it because it's too much effort for such a tiny, tiny reward.

 

there is a friendly competitor that I encounter every week.

stay friendly......keep your thoughts ....& those posted here...to yourself ! .

normally , an old gold watch...is worth the gold weight..
here....I'd think the watch...is worth more than the gold plate..

 

I’ve often wondered about this when I see bundles of gold plated chains and jewellery sell for reasonable money on eBay with lots of bids. Not jewellery that has other saving graces either.
I’ve sold several of those gold plated bangles for more than I expected too.
My OH and I watched a video on reclaiming the gold as we were interested. It was a rather tortuous and toxic procedure that we agreed wasn’t for the amateur or the faint hearted but the guy in the video gave some figures that made it very worth while for him although I can’t remember now how much he earned out of it.

 

I started researching it last night. I was amazed at the gold-plated computer parts. The company arranges Fed Ex shipping for bulk orders. I pick up vintage rgp watches, someday I will make those watch bracelets you see with 5 or 6 different watch faces. I don't get his excitement. As far as competitors or anyone else, I don't share knowledge. It's the kind of thing where we don't step on each other's toes- if he or I find jewelry, we wait until each of us is done with the pile before jumping in on each other. He buys whole lots, but spends hundreds on them. Not seeing how he gets his money back on some of them.

Found this
https://www.goldnscrap.com/post/gold-plating-calculator

 

I think I read somewhere that 1 oz of gold could gold plate 10,000 earring. One reason for gold guilding on military buttons is they don't tarnish. Officers had gold plated buttons.

 

One ounce of gold can be stretched to a length of 50 miles; the resulting wire would be just five microns wide.


One ounce of gold may be hammered thin enough to cover more than 9 square meters (96.9 square feet) of a surface. The gold leaf may be only 0.18 microns (seven millionths of an inch) thick; a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.

Using metric units, one gram of gold could be drawn to a length of 66 km. 2. Gold is also the most malleable of all metals, meaning it can be beaten into thinner sheets than any other metal.

gold is wonderful..

 

The issue with gold plate, though, is it wears off.

 

not if u don't wear it !!....heehehe....

 

Something that’s been overlooked here is many pocket watch cases are gold filled which has much more gold content than gold plated items.
So if you have some gold filled cases that weigh 100g and they’re 1/20 12k gold filled then:
1/20 = 0.05 (or 5%) 100g x 0.05 = 5g 12K = 12/24 = 0.5 (or 50%) 5g x 0.5 = 2.5g of pure gold.

Another item that scrappers look for are gold filled spectacles, if you search eBay sold items for gold filled scrap you will see lots of watch cases and spectacles.

 

I always look for gold-filled items.

 

Gold-FILLING is different from gold PLATING though.

Gold-filling is literally a sheet of gold fused to a sheet of brass, so yes, it's much thicker and lasts longer. I actually ran into a guy at the flea-market once, haggling with another fella for a ziplock bag FULL of old broken GF pocketwatch cases, purely for the gold.

Now in that instance, it might be worth melting, because the gold content is fairly high. But with gold-plated (ie - electroplate), the layer of gold is so thin that you can literally rub it off with your fingers...I don't want to think of how much effort is required to get that gold out, and how little the return would be...

 

I saw a guy at an auction once paying prices that shocked me for old silver plated items. He was scrapping them. Either he had no idea what he was doing or I didn’t. The idea is if you have large enough quantities it’s worth doing for some people I guess.

 

if you have large enough quantities....................there's an idea..!

 

the disasterous results for nature are well-known. it should be done by professionals only that know what they do.

 

This is how they are doing it. Sounds pretty hazardous!

https://www.instructables.com/TRASH-TO-TREASURE/