There is a bag in your drawer. Snapped chains, a couple of single earrings whose partners vanished years ago, a class ring nobody wears, maybe a bent band from a marriage that ended. It has been there long enough that you have stopped seeing it.
That bag is worth money, and it is worth exactly as much as it would be if every piece in it were intact.
Gold does not degrade. A chain that snapped in 1988 contains precisely the gold it contained the day it was made. Scrap gold is priced on purity and weight and then sent to a refinery, where it is melted regardless of what shape it arrived in.
So condition is irrelevant to the number. Not “mostly irrelevant” — irrelevant. A crushed 14K ring and a flawless 14K ring of the same weight are worth the same amount.
Which means there is no reason to repair anything, polish anything, or feel apologetic about the state of anything.
We say this constantly and it matters most here. Old gold looks dull. Cheap plated costume jewelry often looks bright and new. Sorting by appearance produces exactly the wrong result, and every week someone tells us they nearly binned the bag that turned out to be the valuable half.
Bring it in one pile. Sorting takes a few minutes at the counter and it costs nothing.
Marked pieces usually get acid tested — a scratch on a stone, a drop of graded acid, and the reaction gives the karat range. Electronic testing reads conductivity through a probe for a quick estimate without marking anything.
The one that matters most for scrap is XRF spectrometry. It fires low-energy X-rays at the item and reads back the full elemental composition — how much gold, and how much silver, copper, nickel, palladium or platinum. That is how unmarked pieces, dental alloys and mystery lots get priced accurately instead of conservatively.
That distinction is worth money to you. When a buyer cannot determine what something is, they price defensively and you absorb the difference. Proper testing removes the guesswork.
Karat is a fraction out of 24. That fraction is what your payout is built on:
A 20-gram 14K chain contains about 11.7 grams of pure gold. That is the number your offer is built from, not the 20.
This trips up more sellers than anything else. One pennyweight (dwt) is 1.555 grams. One troy ounce is 31.103 grams, or 20 pennyweight. The New York trade often quotes per pennyweight.
So a quote of “$X per pennyweight” is a substantially larger unit than “$X per gram” — about 55% larger. Always confirm the unit before comparing two offers, or you will compare numbers that are not comparable.
Marks reading GP, GF, 1/20 12K GF, HGE, RGP or vermeil all describe a microscopically thin gold layer over base metal. There is no economically recoverable gold in them.
We test those anyway, at no charge, and tell you — rather than folding them quietly into a vague number for the whole lot. Vermeil is the one exception worth a second look, since the sterling silver underneath does carry real value.
Even the tangled half. We buy scrap and broken gold at 30 West 47th Street, 9th Floor. Free testing, no minimum, and no obligation to sell anything. Call 646-846-0401.
Free testing, live spot pricing, cash the same visit.