In this post, we are going to cover how the acid test works with gold.
The most common test in gold purchasing is the acid test. I’m going to show that to you today. Pretty much anywhere that you go, people use this test. There are some basic things we look for when assessing gold using the acid test. So what we’re looking to do here is we use this rock and we scratch multiple marks on it. Typically you just do one. This time I’m going to do three so that you can really see the difference between the different acid levels.
So this item, what we’re doing here is showing it’s stamped 10 carat and we test it, and you can see that there’s really no change in color, that the acid does not dissolve the gold. If we move up to a 14 carat acid solution, you can put it on there and you can see immediately it starts to change the color of the gold in perspective to the 10 carat, but doesn’t completely eat it away, which means that you need to test more with the 10 carat acid.
Then if we go all the way to an 18 carat acid, you can see that almost immediately it dissolves all the gold away, telling you that that item is not 18 carat, not 14, but is 10 carat. And that’s how you utilize the acid test.
Remember, it’s not your job to go through everything that’s old or unwanted to determine what’s real and what’s not; that’s our job. So bring in whatever you have, whatever looks like it’s gold or silver, and we’ll test it for you. Hope to see you soon.