Gold Flake Sample Acquisition

How to Buy Gold Flakes

Buying Gold Flakes

 

Gold Buying Business

I buy gold every day.   A few times a month I get unrefined, natural state condition gold.   This article is about how to buy gold flake, what is the math, what are reasonable expectations, and how much to pay.  I am sure that the explanation and break down will help you understand what is involved in buying unprocessed gold.

 

The Gold Buying Situation

Effectively buying unprocessed gold is easier said than done.   Like most things in the precious metals business, everything sounds easy, until you have to pay for it.  Dealing with precious metals is very financially unforgiving.  If you buy the wrong thing, you will loose your capital.   Not only that.  With gold, platinum, palladium and silver, just about any amount is a lot of money.   Just consider that a few grams of gold is several hundred dollars.  So making mistake in precious metal acquisitions is not cheap.  I will show you here how to make an offer on such material.

 

Real Life Sample Gold Flakes Effective Acquisition

Yesterday someone brought to me a vile with gold flakes in water.   Here is how I calculated the offer.  I will come out positive.

First of all, I made a comparison with a gold nugget I had that had about the same volume, and made an estimate based on that.  The point of this is to arrive to an approximation, that if it becomes accepted as an offer, I am willing to do the sale.  It turns out that I was off by 1 grams in the customer’s favor.  So the customer would have been better off taking my initial offer.  But the customer wanted to go ahead and arrive to a more precise figure.  That is usually my preference too.

First I had the seller drain the water out of the vile, then remove the gold flakes by dumping the remaining mass into to two fine colanders one after the other, and after a sheet of paper.  Then we let some evaporation happen.  I ended up with a mass of gold flake held to together by certain amount of moisture.   To get the sample much dryer would have taken hours.

The mass of gold flake had a total weight of 11.6 grams.  I estimated the moisture plus some of the non gold to be 0.6 grams.  So my offer was for 11 grams of gold flake materials.   Given my experience with this raw gold, I offered my price for 18K, in dollars per grams, multiplied by 11 grams.   After drying the gold flakes, I was able to confirm that my offer for this gold was fair, right on, and profitable.  Both, the seller and me, came out positive.

In gold flake samples or lots, all kinds of other particles will be present no matter how clean is sample.  See breakdown below of typical.  This particles range from pieces of pyrite, iron, quartz, etc.  Some of this matter can be removed, for example if they contain no gold particles. .  Some other pieces can’t be removed because they do contain gold particles.

As you can see from the break down, I came very close to expectations by offering at 18K.  I am confident refinery results will match closely my results.  So this is how you buy gold flakes with confidence.

 

Total Mass @ Scale	11.6 grams
(0) Offered Mass	11 grams
Dried Mass	11.53 grams
(1) Mostly Gold Flake / Metal	10.868 grams
Non-Metal / Mostly pirite	0.662 grams
Moisture (water)	0.07 grams
(2) Estimated Non-Metal in (1) @ 3% – Clean Flakes 0.03 x 10.868	10.54 grams
(3) Estimated Non-Metal in Clean Flakes @ 3%  /  0.03 x 10.54	10.22 grams
Estimated Fine Gold Content of (3) Clean Flakes @ 82% / 0.82 x 10.22	8.38 grams
Estimated Fine Gold Content of (0) Offered Mass @ 75% / 0.75 x 11	8.25 grams