Plumbata
Bronze Member
In the past 6 weeks I've done pretty well with my silver and pewter scrap hunting. Thankfully my Goodwill isn't good at screening out silver so I tend to have luck finding cheap candle holders and the like, but big heavy pieces sometimes show up too. Last year I got a German .800 silver platter weighing 1126 grams for 4 bucks and in June scored this big Revere style Sterling fruit bowl weighing 952 grams (pictured scale has 5g increments) that was also just 4 bucks. Monogrammed and damaged so I won't feel bad turning it back into bullion.
I checked again yesterday and found a few hundred bucks worth of old books but no silver, so I hit the antique mall which has produced well in the past and scored 4 silver items at good prices, the best being this 358 gram Danish bowl with the 3-tower assay mark with date which I guess most people don't understand indicates a 826/1000 fineness. $10 is more than Goodwill would charge but I can't complain.
A few weeks ago I hit my first estate sale in a long time, afternoon of day 2 and 1/2 off so I wasn't expecting much. Saw some weighted Gorham candle holders for $100 on a table marked "not half off" so figured I wouldn't find anything for the scrap pile but upstairs sandwiched between kitschy bicentennial china plates was this sterling Tiffany piece weighing 274g I would have been happy to pay the $2 for but which was just a buck.
Not really worth picturing is 10lbs of pewter (tin is in global shortage and will probably perform extremely well this decade) and around 600g of stripped .800 and sterling handles, spoons and doodads accumulated in the same time.
I'll keep the nice Danish bowl in my antique silver treasure hoard but have the rest refined, .9999 ingots take up less space and are much more liquid.
I checked again yesterday and found a few hundred bucks worth of old books but no silver, so I hit the antique mall which has produced well in the past and scored 4 silver items at good prices, the best being this 358 gram Danish bowl with the 3-tower assay mark with date which I guess most people don't understand indicates a 826/1000 fineness. $10 is more than Goodwill would charge but I can't complain.
A few weeks ago I hit my first estate sale in a long time, afternoon of day 2 and 1/2 off so I wasn't expecting much. Saw some weighted Gorham candle holders for $100 on a table marked "not half off" so figured I wouldn't find anything for the scrap pile but upstairs sandwiched between kitschy bicentennial china plates was this sterling Tiffany piece weighing 274g I would have been happy to pay the $2 for but which was just a buck.
Not really worth picturing is 10lbs of pewter (tin is in global shortage and will probably perform extremely well this decade) and around 600g of stripped .800 and sterling handles, spoons and doodads accumulated in the same time.
I'll keep the nice Danish bowl in my antique silver treasure hoard but have the rest refined, .9999 ingots take up less space and are much more liquid.
