My Grandfather is almost 90 years old and he has a big diamond that he gave my Grandmother that he doesn’t need anymore and could use the money to pay his medical help.
It is almost a 7 karat solitaire and it is pretty good in quality. What is the best way of selling it without getting ripped off by either the price or someone switching stones on me when they are looking at it?
Any diamond experts out there?
Hmmm…I’d go to a jeweler and ask. Is it in a ring-an antique dealer, estate auctions and the like.
DON’T go through ebay or something-look into official retailers and stuff.
First, I’d pay to get it appraised and graded/photographed by a very reputable jeweler. Then, I’d start checking with auction houses, and the very top of the line jewelers around town (look for those who do custom work).
My dad (a former custom jeweler) would, at times, be looking for a specific stone, and would search near and far, so any good jeweler may have some ideas about who around the country was looking for one.
Be prepared to have to ship the stone on consignment (with all insurances etc.). No one is going to buy a stone of that size etc w/o seeing it first.
(I used to go to the post office all the time for daddy with boxes and boxes of stones on consignment - no one would ever have suspected the little hippie flower child of carrying a couple hundred tho’ worth of stuff).
Wring,
You were a hippie flower child COOL! And now you deal with adult probation. Now how can you look a weed smoking dude with a straight face and say this is bad for ya and you shouldn’t do it. 
Oh wow I almost forgot my follow up question. How can you trust these consignment jewelers to send the stones back if they don’t sell em? I’m pretty cynical sometimes huh? Also if they do send them back do you need to take it back to the appraisal dude to make sure he didn’t give you a fake?
You can get a number written on it to protect it…or a special photograph of it would also identify it. The largest amount of money for it would probably come from a famous auction studio, Butterfields & Butterfields, for example. Most Jewelers would probably give you crap for it but you can try them.
You should ask around (friends, family, co-workers) for the name of a good jeweler in your area, but NOT a chain store like Kay Jewelers! Go to a reputable (usually single-location) place that has a GIA (Gemological Institute of America) certified gemologist and get an appraisal. It should cost about $25-30. If the store handles estate jewelry, they might be interested in buying the stone.
One word of advice:
No offense, but are you sure it’s real?
I spent a couple of years working in the service department of a local jewelry store. People would come in all the time with a box full of great-granny’s stuff and dollar signs dancing in their eyes. Many times half of it was junk. Yes, even 80-100 years ago they made fake stones and fake pearls and gold-plated crap. You can’t imagine how pissed off people would be when we told them it wasn’t really worth anything.
Bill
Kinsey has it right. I work for the largest non-chain jewelry in the Akron/Canton Ohio area. We have a GIA certified gemologist on staff. He charges $35 for a truly accurate appraisal. He can “plot” your stone for a small additional charge, which simply means he shows where the flaws are and what they are-all on a little line drawing of a diamond.
Once you know what the exact carat weight, and color(such as D,E F etc.) and the clarity I, SI[sub]1[/sub] , VS etc.I can tell you what we would pay cash for your stone, assuming it is a modern(post WWII) cut and is generally well cut. We pay half of Rappaport sheet value. This is a weekly wholesale sheet to the trade. At least in the Northern Ohio area, we are the higher buyers at half of sheet. We retail stones at full Sheet price. AT this level, we are the lowest sellers in the No.OHIO market.
If this sounds like too much mark up, you should see what mark up is in the average retail jewelry store.
You can e-mail me if you have more questions.
Sam
Bill -I could be misremembering the term, but what dad would do is to request that the stone be sent, it would be insured during shipment, and there’d be some provisional contract kind of thing that either he’d send it back (and I’d have the postal receipts/insurance tags for that) or send the agreed to amount of money. IIRC, it’s pretty common. What Kinsey was talking about is the same thing that I mentioned. Dad was a certified Gemologist, and the descriptions of stones (that large and distinct anyhow) was pretty specific.
RE: the hippie - dressed like a hippie, had very little interest in the drug scene - I had friends who smoked dope/ took pills of various natures etc, but I didn’t care for it myself.
RE: how did/do I deal with it now? Same way as with alcohol. Some people have no apparent problem with drugs/ or alcohol. Some people do. I’d think that if you lost your liberty for a period of time due to your actions connected with drug/alcohol use, that would put you firmly in the class of folks with problem usage. Even if not, if you’re in a situation where you know that your continued freedom depends on your ability to remain drug and alcohol free for a specific length of time, and that some one is going to be checking on it, and you still convince yourself that ‘it’ll be ok if I do this one little line…’ that firmly plants you in the category of folks who make poor decisions about using substances. MHO. YMMV.