Very little info turns up on Google. One sold on the bay for $700. Do these look legit? Thanks in advance.
With pieces like these, the ONLY way to determine whether they're legit is to drill them, a partially destructive technique.
Can't you do a density test with water? I've seen people using the technique on youtube videos. Give it a try...better than drilling.
Its still a way to test the bar to figure out if it is even worth your time. I'd say try the old sound test, rare Earth magnet, and density, and if those pass them chances are you have a legitimate product / or partially legitimate (could still have a small nonsilver core) and would be worth your time and money sending out to get assayed and melted in exchange for cash or new bars. If it doesn't pass those basic tests, don't even bother contacting anyone to send it out to get assayed and melted, because that means most of the inside of the bar is fake.
All of this is why I tend to stay away from bars. Not enough people appreciate the fact that when it comes time to sell, the buyer rightfully will be worried of fraud or plated bars. Mr. Bellman is completely correct, all PM bars are counterfeitable, and they are getting better of getting specific gravity right. For gold they simply use tungsten, but with silver multitudes of cheap metal in combination can completely imitate silver sg. Heavily plate that, and without partially destroying the bar there is no way a buyer to know if they are being swindled. The benefit coins have is known, tight parameters and design. Much harder to fake those as easily.
Negitive these are NOT to be melted, well at least not by me. The seller x-ray tests all silver brought into the store. Seller says there worth $600ea. I may have to test that theory. I'll Check them out better when I get back to the tools, but they do come with a return policy.
Not that they would be, but how do you know they're not, ohh, let's say uranium inside? You can't know.
I just think they are very ugly. If a person likes them, that's fine, but I just don't see them as something to collect.
You may be thinking Lead? B-day is probably more of a density or abnormalities check. As far as UGLY, if someone is willing to double up my investment,who am I to judge.
B day Stupid spell check. Well these bars pass all my tests. Magnet check for correct movement. Weight is good. Metal detector reads SILVER.
I think a sigma tester can let you know as well. Some of these pours are crude and I bet easy to replicate.....if the chinese can fake a morgan very well, I'm sure they can fake these.
Voids and porosity in a bar like this can give erroneous readings on a resistivity tester. In addition, the Sigma Metalytics tester needs to be internally calibrated to the specific alloy you want to check. Should be straightforward for .999 bullion, but you need to understand a little of the science behind the equipment if you want to use it on something different. Sigma even notes in their literature that coins like Franklin halves may measure slightly out range for 90% silver because of compositional variations in the remaining 10% of the alloy. Tools like a resistivity meter and handheld XRD units are great, IF the user understands how it works and its limitations.
I'm still deeply, deeply skeptical of Sigma's claims. I have no doubt they can tell a 90% Franklin or Morgan from a silver-plated steel copy. I'm not as sure they can tell 90% silver from a silver-plated copper core. But if their machines read wrong on Franklin halves, and they're saying "well Franklin halves aren't really 90% silver/10% copper, the Mint cheated on those", it sets off all my alarms. At the VERY least, I'd expect them to borrow an XRF scanner and demonstrate that some Franklin halves are made of the wrong stuff. If I were in their shoes, I'd gather up coins that produce incorrect readings and send them off to a lab for a totally destructive and totally accurate quantitative analysis. Their manual says that the machine can read incorrectly on "deeply embossed" coins. My take is that their machine is a lot more sensitive to SHAPE than to composition -- that worn-flat coins will register as expected, but a well-struck Franklin is likely to fail. (I don't have the math chops to figure out the AC electrical properties of an irregular solid, so I can't prove my claim, but I'm pretty confident in my intuition here.) Blaming it on the Mint using substandard silver? Yeah, I'm going to need to see some independent confirmation. Coin composition is kind of a big deal, and always has been, especially when PMs are involved.
Go straight to gamma. Cobalt-60 photons will go through any coin, although a Yap stone might leave them a bit peaked. Plus your source gets you fast-tracked to the special line at the airport.
As for the OP's question, I have no idea if those bars look legit, but I wouldn't buy silver of any form at 4x melt value unless I could be darn sure it was legit, without drilling it. Even then, if it's a collectible with such a narrow market, I'd be afraid that I'd one day be stuck selling it at melt (to someone who'll insist on drilling it first).