Franklin Mint States of The Union 50 24kt Gold Plate on Sterling

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The medals discussed in this thread were produced in the 1970's, made of legitimate sterling silver. They have value. Please don't generalize they are no good because of recent junk produced, rather judge those medals for what they are--sterling silver and have value. I will pay melt value for any gold or silver coin or medal produced by the Franklin Mint made in the 1970's. I suspect the numismatists of those by gone days started trashing FM, and it has stuck. Don't get me wrong--FM produced some junk then and now....but not the coins and medals of the 1970's.

 

My father retired after 30 years in the U.S.Navy & Army and 3 wars. When he retired, he started getting all sorts of circulars from FM and other businesses selling junk, but he loved them and took care to make sure they looked good. I looked at some of his collections and they were still shiny and bright. He left all of it to my brother and I. My brother isn't a coin collector and he really liked the things my father collected, so I told him that he could have them, but the real coins were divided in half. He lives in California and I live in North Carolina. I'm 73 and he is 70, so it is hard to see him and his "collections".

 

Closer to 48 oz.

This is probably a fairly old set, the Franklin Mint is basically just a marketer of other people junk. They haven't done striking of coins or medals for a couple decades. These do bear the frankline mint mintmark so they probably date back to the 90's or earlier.

 

Those are gorgeopuss! I bid 1,000,000 in Monopoly money - which is suitable for purchasing coin adjacent round discs. I might even throw in a hotel!

 

https://franklin-mint-silver.com/franklin-mint--silver-gold-and-silver-weights.htm


Possibly worth more than I originally thought.......

 

They have value only to someone WHO WANTS TO BUY THEM. That's the point. No one wants to buy them except maybe you.

 

The idea of actually melting them down is intriguing and mentioned above 40 something ounces is about $1,300, so you can bargain, though how difficult would it be to also separate and extract the melted gold? Is there a service that would do this?

 

They don't produce coins.

 

480 grains in a Troy oz so if they are 500 grains sterling per coin that’s 52.08 Troy oz.
Being Sterling is .925 at today’s melt that’s appox 1339.80 if my calculations are right.

 

Yes. I was ballparking but yeah it's something like that neighborhood.

And Chris earlier asked about reclaiming the gold plating. there's not enough of it to make the price of the chemicals necessary to reclaim the gold plating worthwhile. you'd need to have a lot more of it and sit on the silver until you did. Most will just not count it or value it at all and it goes to waste because the money is worthwhile out of the silver.

Density of 0.5 micron gold plating is something like 6.23 mg per square inch. 1 gram of 24k gold can plate 160 square inches of metal to a thickness of 0.5 microns which is the jewelery minimum standard for gold plating in the u.s. if it's to be sold here. It can be thicker, but that's the minimum thickness it can be if it's sold here as "gold plated" jewelery and a good rule of thumb when trying to value gold plated jewelery.

It's like 4 cent's per square inch of 0.5 micron plating roughly, something like that if you got it all out of the reclaimation.

I had an idea to reclaim gold plating many years ago and looked into it. It can be done, but it's not cost effective to do it for what you get from it compared to the costs to do it, and it's dangerous for your health if not done right or the metals in the mix are problems so you'd need the right setting and equipment. You'd need to recover likely at least a half pound of gold in a run in order for it to be worth the costs to do it and the time it takes. Anyways, just saying gold plating doesn't really have any value as far as reclaiming unless you have a whole lot of it.

 

I agree. The Franklin Mint puts out decent "stuff". The problem is they are virtually worthless, any value is in the eyes of the beholder (original buyer).

 

If you check this site you'll see the Franklin Mint did produce legal tender coins for several countries; Panama, Bahamas, et al. Many were collector coins but they also made them for circulation. https://onlinecoin.club/Info/Mints/Franklin_Mint/Coins/2/

 

I like my 1.2336 oz ASW FM proof 5 dollar coin struck for Jamaica in 1973.

 

15.4324 grains = 1 gram
500 grains / 15.4324 = 32.399 grams
32.399 grams * .925 = 29.97 grams of silver per "coin"
29.97 grams / 31.1 grams = .964 ozt each
.964 * 50 = 48.18 troy oz of silver

 

Regardless in your views of FM, that’s still a LOT of silver melt.

 

The images makes the size of these things deceptive. At 500 grains each of those medals would be 20% larger than a silver dollar

 

My now deceased Dad threw away ( invested ) thousands of dollars in FM junk. He asked me to sell off his "collection" a few years before he passed on. Local coin dealers won't even give you face value for this crap ! They don't want it. Zero value !

 

So sorry about your loss. The value in the FM pieces is generally the older issues and the sterling silver pieces. The 5 dollars Jamaica above has more than $30 of silver. Face value of 5 Jamaica dollars is 3.3 US cents. So yeah none of the Cupro nickel stuff is worth much unless it is in perfect condition and even then US Coin dealers still don't know what to do with it.

 

Unless you want to keep it for sentimental reasons, put them up on eBay with a starting bid somewhere close to melt value. Just a suggestion, not trying to tell you what to do.