Fake "silver" bar I've owned for years...

Meltdown

Let me start by saying, I know better than to buy un-marked bullion... (Well, maybe I don't)
A couple years back I was at a large expo antique show here in town. They put it on every 3 months and dealers from all over the northwest show up. It's huge, you can't hardly walk through it all in an afternoon. A coin dealer out of California sets up in the same place every year and I'd purchased stuff from his booth many times. This particular ingot was in his case for a couple years, I'd looked at it and passed on it previously. The latest time,
He stated it was silver, we discussed why it wasn't marked, if it was a garage job, etc.
I really liked it and finally took it home for a slight premium at the time, $85 bucks.
Fast forward to this past week, i took it to my local shop to test on their signa analyzer thing and it didn't register on any purity. I left it with them to send to our local assay refiner place and it was determined to be nearly solid tin with lead coating.

How about that? I'm disappointed and surprised for sure but still think it's cool as hell. It has some blemishes now from acid and cutting...

blitzdude

Looks like lead in the pictures. The sigma is not accurate at all so wouldn't put too much faith there. I can make 1970's copper cents register .999 silver on the sigma. lol

blitzdude

P.S. Sorry for your loss. $85 is better than $850 or $8500.

rte592

I seen people bidding or buying these as vintage silver bars.

Sure thing silver colored bar

Kliao

Looks like it was filled and tested with acid. Did you or the LCS do that or was it already there when you bought it?

Meltdown

@Kliao said:
Looks like it was filled and tested with acid. Did you or the LCS do that or was it already there when you bought it?

That was done recently by the local refinery here. I gave them the ok after it was determined it was some alloy and lead mixture

ricko

I have seen similar at antique shows.... just looked off to me. Now I take lead test swabs with me... but have not had an antique show this year. Cheers, RickO

Namvet69

The next question is, if your creative juices are flowing, what can you do with that hunk of lead? Other than making sinkers. Peace Roy

asheland

I hate that. I had a guy in my shop recently with similar bars, bought them from a garage sale he said if I remember it correctly sigma said no good. Their color was off, too. I'm very careful with silver bars...

Meltdown

I've seen my share of lead, even have a couple ingots as example... this piece is smooth and looks very much like darkly toned silver tarnish. I took a chance and felt pretty good about it for a couple years even knowing the difficulty in selling it some day down the road. It's a very good "fake" assuming that is what it was intended for.

johnny9434

Lesson learned. That could be almost any one of us to do that

Jimnight

That's to bad you got ripped off.