Bullion dealer have a variety of machines to measure the purity of your gold.
One common test is a ring test where you measure the sound a coin makes when struck in a specific way, this is the same principle used for vending machines to accept or reject you coin.
Bullion dealer have a variety of machines to measure the purity of your gold.
One common test is a ring test where you measure the sound a coin makes when struck in a specific way, this is the same principle used for vending machines to accept or reject you coin.
Good one. I had a similar experience, but with a bigger “brick” of gold that was about 4x the size of the one in that video. It was in the Philippines, at a Benguet gold mine, The brick was not in a box, it was laying on a table and we were there during a gold pour so the temps in there were pretty hot. There was plenty of armed security around our tour group of friends of a Benguet Corporation exec.
The challenge to us was if anyone could pick up that brick with one hand, we could keep it. We tried, and of course we could not. It weighed about 100 pounds.
Changing subjects, I work at a surgical robotics company that makes a radiation oncology linear accelerator — a linac for short. The radiation is shielded, in part, by tungsten. I have a scrap piece of tungsten that’s about the size of a brick, and the thing is heavy! The manufacturing guys gave it to me, and I use it as a doorstop.
In rough numbers,
- 197 is the standard atomic weight of gold, Au.
- 207 is the standard atomic weight of lead, Pb.
- 185 is the standard atomic weight of tungsten, W.
So Pb, lead, is about 5% heavier than gold.
So W, tungsten, is about 6% lighter than gold. And tungsten is about 12% lighter than lead.
I plan to keep that chunk of tungsten as a linac souvenir (of sorts).
Atomic weight and density are not the same.
I didn’t say they were.
Maybe somebody else did.
“Proof quality 99.99% pure gold with high relief strike” at this website. Quite common for coins, I thought, but I am not an expert.
n my dialect, “heavier” here means “has a higher density.”
I think I may be stupid about numbers. So in 100 terms, what is equal to 999.9?
99.999?
Uhhh… what? Atomic weight has no bearing with the density of an element… which is what determines what is “lighter” or “heavier” when put on a scale.
Lead has a density of 11.34 g/cm3.
Good has a density of 19.32 g/cm3.
Tungsten has a density of 19.3 g/cm3.
As can be seen, lead is roughly 41% lighter than gold, and tungsten and gold are basically equally heavy (gold is a smidge heavier).
Nitpick: While density and atomic weight are different there is some correlation (“bearing”), as suggested by this list:
.071 liquid hydrogen (AW 1)
.125 liquid helium (AW 4)
8.96 copper (AW 64)
10.5 silver (AW 108)
19.3 gold (AW 197)
19.1 uranium (AW 238)
24kt gold jewelry is (or at least was) popular in Asia as an easy way to carry around escape money in case things went pear-shaped. It does bend easily, though, more so than most people would want.
That would be 99.99% Au. I recall reading when I was young that the Soviets produced “5 nines” gold for the sheer bragging rights. It would sell at a premium because there was a dab more gold in it but most producers figured the extra refining expense was not worth it.
So are the X-ray fluorescence spectrometers not commonly used? It seems like the obvious thing to do before accepting a gold bar worth hundreds of thousands of USD at a minimum. Stick it in the machine and make sure it’s actually gold in the middle.
Googling for it, apparently there are hand held machines that look like a bar code scanner?! I’m not sure how this is remotely radiation safe, and I’m not sure they can measure the middle of a gold brick, but anyways…
In Thailand, jewelry and bars are 96.5%, or about 23 Karats.
(Some foreigners complain that this will make their “go bag” useless for travel to the West. But carrying gold bullion across borders isn’t high on my To-Do list. :rolleyes: )
Oh okay thank you JoseB, and septimus too. This makes sense. Sorry for the confusion!
Dunno. But in the past they have drilled when there was uncertainty of supply, and, when the gold comes from a trusted supplier, that’s also the point of serial numbers.
X-rays are EM that is typically generated by a simple electric process in a powerful vacuum tube. In general, the radiation goes where you point it and is negligibly reflective, so the x-rays themselves are not very hazardous, there are no radioactive isotopes involved, and the detection process is about the observable effects of the x-rays on the material, which generates lower-energy EM. It could very easily be radiation safe.
So there is, in fact, no reason to write 999.9 gold rather than 99.99. OK.
Well, there is, because the value is called “Fineness” and it is expressed as a parts-per-thousand number. If you speak of 99.99 gold, you are talking about 2.4 karat gold, which is mostly something besides actual gold.
So the reason is basically: “that is the way we in the gold community have always done it despite the fact that it doesn’t match the way anyone else expresses completeness.”
You could make a case that “we have always done it that way” is not really a good reason.
At the risk of winning Today’s Most Obvious Nitpick award:
If someone speaks to you about 99.99 gold, they’re referring to 999.9 gold, and NOT 2.4 karat gold. hth.