Not your every day garage sale find, lol.

Trigger warning: This is not your normal garage sale find. Just a little... unusual.

Late in the day at a yesterday I went back to a neighborhood garage sale that I'd actually been to the day earlier. It was a 3 day fundraiser and people were continuously dropping items off, so went by to see if anything new was there.

Here was a shoe box of jewelry someone must have dropped off later. Nothing too great, a clump of low end vintage plastic necklaces tangled together and a few odd items. But I found a very cool agate cufflink and I was hoping to find the mate.

Couldn't find it, so as a last ditch effort, I pretty much took everything big carefully out of the shoe box and set it to the side in case something fell out of the clump of necklaces.

No agate cufflink.

However, in the bottom of the box....

 

Yes a gold crown. I'm sorry to post it if anyone has trouble seeing that or thinking about that. Clearly from a pulled tooth with a crown (I may need to have a tooth pulled sadly, so definitely not making fun of this.)

But I knew to get the loose crown. Especially a 14K one.

Gold places buy these without hesitation. Hopefully the former owner is doing well.

 

Wowwww! Stellar find!!

 

Not too shabby, Lucille!

 

Score! Instant scrap. They don't do gold work any more, so the original owner may be dead of old age.

 

While I don't have anything with as much gold as this tooth, I do have 2 gold foils in 2 bottom molars on opposite sides of my mouth. They were a requirement to graduate the OSU dental school so whenever they could, they asked and put them in. Every dentist I've ever had comments on them.

 

My mom had one of those until the tooth had to be fixed again.

 

Old dental gold is usually higher than 14K. Quite often, it is 22K. I found dental gold in a little Native American pot at a garage sale for a $1.00 one time. If I recall, it was several pieces and weighed over 15 g.

 

wheee. Don't you wish you'd held onto it to scrap now.

 

We have a few gold crowns and a partial that we found in father-in-law's belongings after he died. The partial still has the fake tooth in it. It looks really old.
We don't know who's head they came out of. This family kept everything ......

 

In that case it was a status symbol.
In some cultures gold teeth are put in for status, even if there is nothing wrong with the teeth, or dentures in this case. It means you have the money to pay for them. Assuming you're not dirt poor after paying for them.

 

Remember when "grills" were a thing? mostly with rappers.

 

What does it weigh, Lucille?

 

That's about $400! Very nice!

 

What a lucky find, @Lucille.b ! The stories people have posted here are fun, too.

 

I did test it and it's 14K, not 18K. Going on Ebay sales of sold, 1.9 grams of 14K scrap, maybe around $150.

But who knows!

 

Fingers crossed.