I have some old yellow gold jewelry that I no longer wear and want to have it melted down and made into something else. Probably a ring.
My question is this, I prefer white gold and was wondering if yellow gold can be made into white gold? Isn’t the difference between the two in the heating process?
White gold is simply gold that has been alloyed with nickel or palladium.
I’m not sure if your average jeweler is capable of this task.
I would take it to the guy who made our wedding bands. I don’t trust the mall jewelers or the barbie dolls they hire to make me feel bad about my short small skinny fingers not being being able to handle an 8 carat diamond.
SAY WHUT?!
Speaking as the daughter and grandaughter of a jeweler (not a mall jeweler 
), when people wanted their gold melted down and cast as something else, it usually ended up costing more that just buying a new piece. (The average wedding ring has a scrap value of about $30 to a jeweler, so you’re not saving much) I’d only recommend it if the pieces have major sentimental value. Turning yellow gold into white gold would require separating out the pure gold from the alloy metals and re-alloying it; there’s not much chance that anyone but a gold refiner who really likes you will do that. (They might just cast something in white gold and tell you they had used your gold, if they’re dishonest) If you seriously want the look of white gold and want to use your old yellow gold, you could rhodium plate a yellow gold piece, and the color would last for a few years before you had to re-do it.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Gaudere, so you’re saying you couldn’t just use latex paint to turn the pure gold into white gold?
Dang, I was looking forward to green gold with purple stripes.
There is green gold (you add silver); and I’m willing to bet someone’s made purple. So your dream may come true after all.
The coolest gold I know of is 99% pure gold alloyed with 1% titanium. Neato.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Iridescent patina?
No, it looks like 24k gold (which we rarely see in jewelry; it is much “oranger” than our popular perception of gold), but it is strong enough to be used in jewelry. Pure 24k is much too soft (it is used sometimes, but it wears very easily). Titanium is sometimes used in fine jewelry, but it is rare. I think I’ve seen iridium jewelry which had been treated to make it a brilliant blue.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Gaudere,since you know about the biz.We wanted to have our rings made by a local artisan,who’s work we admired.He said he could make silver rings no problem,but if we wanted gold we would have to buy it ourselves because he had a felony record and couldn’t buy it.He made it sound like I would have a hasle getting it too. I think he just didn’t want to do it,he owed me a favor and I think this wasn’t the way he wanted to pay back.Do you know anything about that?It was 1960.
I have no idea why he couldn’t buy gold; that doesn’t seem to make any sense. He might have had such a bad credit report from his arrest that no refiner was willing to sell him anything expensive (since these transactions are almost always on credit). I would think you could just sweet talk any jeweler into selling you some of his 14k gold alloy. He/she would charge you a bit more for it that it cost him/her, but it’s still much cheaper than buying a cast piece and melting it down. When I did some jewlery making as an art student, we had catalogues that we could use to order gold for casting/soldering, no problem. And of course in the biz we’d get catalogues everyday from the refineries, trying to sell us their gold.
Interestingly, silver is more of a pain to work with than gold. The melting point is higher. So people who want their $8 silver rings sized often have to pay as much as someone with a gold ring, assuming you can find a jeweler who wnats to mess with it.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
From 1930-something until 1970-something (?) – I’m unsure of the dates, but 1960 is definitely in there – Americans were not permitted to own gold. It was an anti-panic measure of the Depression that stuck around until the government noticed how much of the money supply was going overseas to buy off-shore Krugerrands.
Now, obviously, jewelers and those working in certain other industries must have had an excemption; I suppose it was in the form of some kind of license, and it is reasonable that a felony conviction might be a bar to obtaining that license.
(There was also, of course, a numismatic excemption and an excemption for finished jewelry.)
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Gaudere,
Great insite to the world of jewerly. I hate just having these few peice of jewelry laying around ( they were gifts from old boyfriends or my mom) and I’m wondering if it would be worth it to take it to a pawn shop, though those places give me the willies.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei