Quoted: I have a wedding ring laying around the house...I try to think of something cool to do with the gold every so often...but nothing has come to mind.
Isn't the melting point of gold somewhere around 1600 F? How hot does a propane torch get?
Better question is...what the hell do I do with the melted blob of gold?
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I met a guy years ago who was in the gold reclaiming business, as one of the things he did. He explained it was very easy. First, you just put an ad in the paper that you will buy old gold jewelry. Then you get an assay kit, which is available for not much money (couple hundred bucks or so, IIRC). Assaying is easy. You just rub the jewelry on a stone, drop on some liquid and in a minute you know what the purity is.
then you simply weigh it ($200 for a good scale) and offer the person a price. Just keep an eye on the price of gold, and what you can sell it for, and make them an offer. Chances are they aren't going to spend a lot of time shopping it around, anyway, so it is possible to make a healthy profit margin.
Smelting wasn't a problem, either, he said. You just take the big box of stuff to the smelter, they melt it for you, assay it themselves, and give you the cash. Smelting it yourself isn't all that hard, but will probably require more regulatory nonsense than you want.
Or so he told me, anyway.