If you don't visit the darkside forum often--take note

Weiss

I've had a hankering for more exotic pieces of junk silver lately. My dealer routinely ships off foreign junk to be melted. Saw he had a shipment ready recently, and asked if I could take a peek--save him shipping and make him a little more than the smelter would give him. He said sure!

This was a huge box of several thousand pieces. I just did a quick search in the ".900" silver bag and picked out these two pieces for melt. The German piece is a typical 19th century "crown"--every country had the equivalent to our silver dollar at the time. The smaller (Manchurian/Chinese) piece intrigued me because it just looked exotic. At 4 grams, less than $5 melt, I thought it was neat.



Saw an episode of Storage Wars a few weeks back where a coin dealer used a simple magnet to determine if suspect coins were fake. Tried it on the Manchurian piece tonight and it stuck like glue.

Now I KNOW better--I'd never had bought real dollars worth of Chinese coins or frankly ANY coins that I wasn't 100% familiar with. This was just a cheap impulse buy.

And a magnet doesn't always work. There are some counterfeit alloys that aren't magnetic. I've got a fake 1 oz round here on my desk that doesn't stick but there is no question it's a fake.

Anyway, you might carry a magnet with you if you dabble in darkside stuff from time to time. It's cheap insurance

RedTiger

Thanks for the tip about the magnet. Keep it away from the credit cards though.