Why do we test with electronic AND acid?
This is a very good question to look at in detail. At the end of the day, it simply comes down to safe guarding the company and it’s profits, but let’s look deeper in the reasoning.
The reason we get this question is typically because electronic testing is a new style and a lot of the older companies don’t take advantage of it. Every gold buyer/pawn shop has their own testing methods. For us, we want to be as detailed as possible in our testing. OKC Gold Buyers is a scraping or refining business. This means every thing we purchase is sent to the refiner for recycling. This is a great cause because it takes over 20 tons of excavation of the earths soil to recover a single ounce of gold. And, on average, a U.S. Household has over an ounce of unused and unwanted precious metals. In reality, an average household, has a lot more then an ounce as an ounce doesn’t way very much. So not only are you making money by recycling these metals but you are helping the planet too.
So what does this have to do with testing? OKC Gold Buyers gets paid based on the refined percentage of the precious metal. Since gold jewelry is made at several different purity levels, we have to know the exact purity level of each piece of gold, because that number is what we get paid off. Therefore, if our testing methods are not accurate and we buy an 18kt piece of gold (72% melt purity) and it really turns out to be 14kt gold (56% melt purity), the company just lost 16% in gold melt alone.
We actually use more then just an electronic and acid test. The very first test we, on everything, is the magnet test. If a piece of jewelry, coin, etc. attracts itself to a magnet, then the piece is fake. It’s that simple. Next, we look it over to see if it looks real. Experienced gold buyers can usually tell just by looking and touching the item if it’s real or not. If it passes those two test, we’ll put an electronic test on it. The electronic test simply tells you what karat it believes the gold is. And while the electronic test is not 100% accurate, it is typically on the spot. Usually we quit testing most jewelry there. But if we feel we need more testing, we’ll then use acid tests. Acid testing is probably the most accurate as we always say, “the acid don’t lie.” It’s simple science of chemical reaction.
We feel we are very thorough testers and the reason is, not only do you have a lot of scammers always coming in with fake gold, but we have seen plenty of fake jewelry items from well known jewelers. So you never know what could or could not be real.