My broken,crushed and a few other gold items missing stones I have sold for melt over the years and got close to $1500 or so for things I would have had just sitting in a box or bag or on display somewhere.
A few gold and silver finds are now my wife's property, two gold rings I kept for myself.
I still have more gold, these are pretty large or in good shape, most with diamonds or intact and large that I would be foolish to sell for melt but I still have not gotten off my butt to sell in other ways.
Maybe ( Edit) maybe even a flea market one day even though most are looking for cheap in those.
Plus I have a whole lot of silver, I might have a yard sale someday and even if I get $10 a ring it can still add up if you sell a lot of them.
Then again it is nice to have some shiny things when you have collections and displays you can admire yourself or show off to others.
I have found way more precious metal than I thought possible when I started in this hobby so I am thrilled to have given my wife some to make her happy, thrilled to have kept some I love for myself and thrilled to have sold others to get money to finance my hobby which is where most of that money goes to.
The pieces I have left will be sold one day, until then I just consider them a unique form of savings account.
Out of everything I have experienced in this hobby one that stands out the most is how I felt when I saw the look on my wife's face when I gave her a class ring that we ordered from Jostens...several years after she graduated from college.
She worked full time and still went to college and studied for several years to get her degree and it was hard.
It was one of the things she accomplished in life that she is most proud of and so was I when I heard about it.
I did not know her when she did it but I was able to complete her dream and buy her a $700 gold class ring later in life...the correct year was even put on it just like she received it the year she graduated.
It was important to me that I bought her this ring from the money I made finding gold in this hobby and not just money I earned from a regular job.
She worked hard getting her degree, I worked hard learning my detectors and how to find and dig gold and also worked hard actually finding it.
Win-win for both of us I figured, one of the most rewarding, thrilling feeling this hobby has given me so far and it was made possible by finding and selling lost gold at melt.
Below is a family pic of the gold I have sitting around that one day will be sold just for fun.
All were dug up out of the ground in public sites, not beaches.
The medallion in the middle is 14k and the wife shocked me when she said it was way to big and blingy for her to wear.
Someone found one that looked exactly like it on a website that sold highly discounted gold jewelry but it was half the size and weight of mine...it still was selling for over $400 so how much is mine actually worth?
The diamonds are real on all of them that have rocks, the bottom right is white gold with 9 diamonds and has been appraised for over $1500, the top right 2 are called channel wedding rings and are two out of 5 I have found in my career.
The top left is white and yellow gold and big, I might end up keeping this one for myself.
The small one on the left has a natural pearl and I assume is very old, a heritage piece that tests for 22k but I believe is 24k...my first and only so far.
The one on the bottom left is marked 916 so 22k with a name on it.
If I buff the name off the thing a 22k ring like this is worth way more than melt as are all of these pieces.
The one with the red stone is broken but the wife likes it so I will repair it and give it to her.
This is that personal savings account I mentioned, just gathering them up to take this pic made me smile, you just gotta love a hobby that can pay you back.
Selling all of these or even just a few of these, even at melt, still will net me enough to buy a whole lot of equipment for this hobby if I want to, at close to retail not much high end would be out of my range, but right now I am happy. Maybe one day.
