Local Coin Shop Not Buying 40% Halves

I wonder, though, whether you'd get into trouble if you tried to melt different .925 batches together. I imagine it would usually be fine.

 

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Heh. I just happened across some of my old eBay email archives from 2010-2014. I was buying a lot of silver then, including some 40%. I've probably still got a lot of it, and now, I might actually be able to get my money back out of it...

 

There's a lot less demand for Sterling than you might think, and a lot more available (every dead Grannie's Sterling Silver Flatware) than needed. So prices are depressed.

The mints want 0.999 for the silver coins/rounds. Melt it, make new planchets, stamp it out.

The stackers want 0.900 because it's easily available in manageable quantities. Doesn't take refining at all.

Then there's scrap - not 0.900, not 0.925, not 0.999 -- handling that takes real refining, and when the refiners are busy with the other stuff, they pay less.

It's almost like there are four separate marketplaces.

 

That's where I sell my scrap sterling silver...right to someone who makes jewelry.

 

I had a cousin who was a jewler in Hungary. When I would go to visit my family I would take 4 or 5 krugerands so that she would have some extra to work with. In the 80's Hungary kept a tight control over the public trading gold.