So how much gold is in gold plating?

[SFBayArea]

Anyone know how much it is? We've all seen those gold plated coins we run into all the time. Perhaps 1 grain per coin?

Is there a way to extract the gold plating? Probably too complicated for the average person. Need special equipment I suppose.

It may not be worth much now if anything right now but what if gold is worth around $3000/oz.? Would the plating be worth $5 or so? I've seen so many by now that many I have returned to the wild.

I've heard stories about people in India that extract gold/silver/platinum from computer boards. The plating on those coins have got to have more gold than some computer board.

 

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[fistfulladirt]

A buddy in the scrapping business used to collect pc boards and process the gold and other metals. It involved melting everything down, and finally using hydrochloric acid and charged plates to extract the small amount of gold. He had to collect a huge amount of circuit boards.
I think this same process would be used to extract the gold plate from halves.

 

[byrne3]

A buddy in the scrapping business used to collect pc boards and process the gold and other metals. It involved melting everything down, and finally using hydrochloric acid and charged plates to extract the small amount of gold. He had to collect a huge amount of circuit boards.
I think this same process would be used to extract the gold plate from halves.

The difference though is that you get the ram chips for free.. If you can get 2 tons of ram for free, then it is worthwhile to extract the gold. You can't get gold plated halves for free. It would also take a lot of time and money to accumulate a large volume of them.

I'm not sure how much gold is in the gold plated half, but I do know there are $50 gold buffalo replicas that are gold plated. They are called the Buffalo Tribute Proofs and contain 14 mg of gold. There are 1000 mg in a gram, and 31.1 grams in a troy ounce so that's .00045 troy ounces of gold, which is about $.72 at current market price.

https://www.2011fiftydollarbuffalo.com/

 

[Cappy Z.]

byrne3, Nice job with the math!

I often do wonder how much gold is being used in industry and what commodities have the largest amount of reusable gold.

 

[legend76]

byrne3, Nice job with the math!

That's what I was thinking......

 

[BuffaloBoy]

probrably not much, still a coin worth keeping- until you get too many. hh!

 

[DarkRider23]

I'm not 100% sure if I'm correct, but I did the math last time I saw one of those "Gold Plated Memoritive Coin" commercials on TV and the gold plating turned out to be worth 12 cents if melted down. The coin was selling for $35 too -_-. Great business they had going there.

 

[AgentX]

I've had decent luck selling these in lots of five on Feebay ranging from $5.00 - $10.00. The ones I usually sell are the 86 plated mentioned in another thread. All you have to do is say gold and people will buy it today.