Learn the three biggest mistakes when weighing sterling flatware: confusing silver-plate for sterling, using regular ounces instead of troy ounces (which are about 10% heavier), and forgetting that sterling is only 92.5% pure silver. Dealers typically pay $50 or less per ounce after accounting for purity and their own discount.
3 biggest mistakes when weighing your sterling flatware. So a lot of my clients call me up and they tell me they have a sterling flatware set. However, they make a lot of mistakes when they ask me about what's going on with the silver. So first of all, the biggest mistake that I see is when people say it's sterling and it's actually silver plate. You want to see the word sterling on it. There are other words that can be substituted for sterling. There could be hallmarks. There could be other ways of saying sterling, could be 800, but you want to see something that indicates it's silver. If it says silver plate or community or 100 other marks that's not silver, then there's probably a problem. So make sure first thing that it is sterling. Second, and this one is very important, you need to make sure you weigh in troy ounces. Regular ounces that you would use on your regular kitchen scale does not work because troy ounces is going to be right around 10% less. You can weigh it in grams and then it's another percentage because it's not 28, it's closer to 31 grams in a troy ounce, but it is not correct to use regular ounces. It needs to be in troy. So if you go on to this scale, which is a scale that I use often, and you put this on the scale, you'll see it's 1.49, and it's OZT, or it might say TOZ on certain other scales. Now, this here, you might see dealers carry or other people. If its item is too large, like a silver tray, sometimes you use this. This is an old English salt scale, but it weighs in troy ounces. So if you put the silver and you hang it from here, Then you could figure out how many ounces. And this is going to be only for troy, which is great. You can use your luggage scale that has a similar hook, except you need to convert it to troy ounces. So basically figure about 10%, 10% less. So those are the first 2. The 3rd thing, when you're weighing the sterling silver and you're figuring out the numbers and you're trying to add it all up, a lot of people go with the price of silver for that day. For example, right now silver's right around $74. So it's not $74 per ounce when you're talking about sterling. The reason is because sterling is 92.5% silver. So if it's $74 is for pure silver, sterling is going to be 92.5% of that. So each ounce is going to be $68 and change, maybe $68.45. So you're not done. No one's gonna pay you that amount because everyone has to have a little bit of room to make money. So if you go to a refiner or a coin shop or something like that, the numbers are gonna get even lower and it could be somewhere around the 50s is a realistic number when you're talking about the price of silver. So again, the price of silver, full price might be $74, $75, but sterling is gonna be 92.5% of that number. And then again, everyone needs to have some room, so you have to take— 10% off. Anywhere from, who knows, 10 to 20% off of that number because a dealer is going to need to make some money, and that's the way it works. As a bonus tip, and this one is another one that a lot of people mistake, and this is the biggest one, they weigh a set and they tell me the set is 110 ounces, and I'm like, a service for 12 is not usually 110 ounces. So people weigh the weighted stuff. What is weighted? A lot of times when when it comes to flatware sets, the knives, the dinner knives, are usually weighted. What that means, this over here, this handle has cement or wax or filling inside. You cannot put this on the scale. So what you have to do is most dealers will give you a 2 to 1 or up to a 4 to 1 ratio, which means 2 of these knives would go to 1 ounce. If it's a smaller knife, they might go to three or even four of these to equal one ounce. I have a lot of this information on other videos that I could attach so you could see that because I have mentioned this before. And the other thing about the weighted stuff, don't forget this is stainless steel. Sometimes it'll say stainless steel, sometimes it won't, but you could tell by the difference in the patina and how the colors look. So these are just a few examples of things that will help you when you're evaluating your sterling flatware. So you could get on the same page with the professionals so you can get a better idea of what your set might be worth. Please subscribe so you don't miss any future videos.
