FAKE SILVER? 8 Ways to Test For It

hey everyone welcome to campbell's coins fake silver is everywhere believe it or not but how can we prevent ourselves from becoming a sucker and buying that fake silver coin bar or round maybe you're incredibly scrupulous and where you purchase your silver but maybe you buy hand pours or silver from a friend or a stranger are they as discriminate as you are and where they get their silver today we'll be looking at eight ways to test for fake silver coming up for in-person purchases there are tests most coin dealers will test a coin before they buy it off the streets so for a majority of coin dealers you know you're buying the real thing and you don't really have to worry about it much especially if your coin dealer is reputable but you're not always guaranteed this and you might be dealing with a source that isn't reputable or at least one you can't really verify like buying off craigslist ebay or a host of other online garage sale type apps i know of a major boolean dealer who has knowingly sold fake or not entirely pure silver to folks and but they do sell it to them as 9999 or excuse me three nines fine silver this thought came to me when considering buying hand pours off the internet how do i know that the person making this port tested the purity maybe they were just going off of what the coin said if i put all three nines fine silver coins into this furnace of mine the result must be three nines fine silver right wrong maybe a round they purchased was fake maybe it wasn't pure silver 90 or sterling silver maybe the rounds you bought off instagram are fake and the seller didn't know so how can you not get screwed when buying silver there are a few tests by the way i have links in the description below of all the items that i mention if you care to buy from them out of these eight tests this is one that i don't recommend because it's too invasive on a coin or a bar and that is the acid test these work just fine with telling you if the item is made of gold or silver or if it's fake but and this is a huge but the acid will damage the coin or bar and it will lower its value especially if it's a rare coin do not use acid on numismatic coins its value will plummet to melt value instantaneously while this test is an option there are better test methods and this is one i will not recommend if you place ice on a piece of silver it will melt fairly quickly compared to room temperature that's because silver has thermodynamic properties this is a tough test because a lot of conditions can affect it like temperature of the room temperature outside and you have to wait around to see if an ice cube will melt quickly on silver so i have a few items set up i have just a block of ice with nothing i have another block of ice but this time i'm going to put a 2006 kennedy clad half dollar on there then i have another one right here this time we're going to put a 64 kennedy half put that right on there and then lastly we have our kilo okay and i'm just going to put this right on top of the kilo and as you can see i don't know if you can see it but the kilo of silver is already melting the ice it's falling down it's kind of moving around it the 64 kennedy is kind of pushing in the clad is still on the top and then we don't really have much pooling around here so yeah it's going to suck to wait to see all this melt that's why i've set up a time lapse camera and you're going to see how fast each of these melt on their own now you can do this test with anything that contains 40 silver 90 silver three nines fine silver four nines fine sterling silver silver will react with ice in the same manner this isn't exactly ideal because you're not going to want to bring a cube of ice with you to a craigslist purchase or even to your local coin shop but it's something that you can do at home this is also why i have other test methods set up so that you can really figure out things about your silver like the kilo is really melting that ice away not so much for the the kennedy half dollar here kind of sunk in and kind of see like a little outline there but that's that's about it and then nothing over here with the clad and then not much melting over here with just the regular ice so all i'm doing right here is i'm showing you that the 90 kennedy if you just push it just a little bit into the ice it will actually carve its way into the ice and start sinking through now conversely i'm trying that with this just clad kennedy half dollar and it is not pushing through the ice i'm actually using quite a bit of force on this and it's still not going through [Music] me [Music] [Music] the magnet test you've probably seen this test to check silver but what do you do how does it work what magnets do you use well you can't use any sort of magnet you have to use a neodymium magnet neodymium is reactive with silver and what you do or what people show is you put a coin or a bar at a 45 degree angle hold it like this and then you place your magnet typically a smaller one than this on the coin and you watch it slowly fall off the reason why it slowly falls off is because even though silver is not magnetic it has magnetic properties so if a neodymium magnet free falls off the coin it is not silver if it sticks to the coin it is not silver but if it slowly falls off it's silver there's just one problem i don't like that test i don't like that you hold a magnet after your coin or bar and you slide it off that could scuff up the coin especially if you have a really nice one so what can you do to mitigate that and this is a thing that i came up with i don't i haven't seen anyone else use this technique and that is i put the coin in a bag like this and i just hold it with my thumb and index and i just hold it so it just hangs there freely and then i will take my neodymium magnet and put it up to the coin and i can already feel that magnetic charge and what i will do without moving the plastic let's see we'll focus is i'll just pull the magnet away this tells me that the coin is silver it's not sticking to the coin i'm not moving it with my fingers this is just the magnet doing it this should happen with any item that has silver in it i've tested this with 40 and 90 constitutional silver and it has the same reaction so it it doesn't have to be pure silver so remember if the magnet has no reaction to the item or if it sticks to the item it's fake if it slowly pulls away or falls off your item has silver in it and while this test will tell you if the item has silver in it it will not tell you the purity of the silver flick a silver coin or piece there is a very distinctive sound compared to a clad coin it's a high pitch heavenly ping there's even sound variations from 100 silver coin to a 35 silver coin and i'm going to show you what each of those sound like so in front of you we have a whole bunch of silver but here i have two non-silver coin these are clad pieces and i'm just going to hold them into in my fingers like this and tap them like that and i'll hold it up to the mic that's the sound of two clad half dollars hitting each other i'm going to start with two 35 percent nickels these contain these are war nickels they're made from 1942 through 1945 and they contain 35 silver and even coins with that low amount of silver will have a very distinctive ring to it so i'm going to hold them like hold them like this and then just tap them against each other and you can hear it all right that was 35 silver nickels next we're gonna move up to 40 silver this is going to be a little bit more distinctive because these are bigger okay that was 40 percent you can do it with a dime but they're very small so you kind of just have to flick them okay so that was two ninety percent dimes and now we're going to move up to ninety percent dollars now these this is a peace dollar and this is a 1921 morgan again i'm just gonna hold them like this and tap them all right that is what two ninety percent silver dollars sound like now i'm moving on to pure silver rounds and i'm going to tap them like this all right that was two pure silver rounds that's 999 fine silver and i have the uh this 10 ounce bar here only because it doesn't really work a whole heck of a lot with large bars and rounds um i mean you can try [Music] it just makes kind of like a clank clank sound um they're kind of big that ringing came from the silver dollar that i hit it with large bars it's going to be a little bit more difficult to to get that sound out of them that's why this test doesn't work for everything across the board if you can master these sound differences you'll be able to tell which kind of silver coin you're getting and if it's real you're going to be able to hear the difference between a 35 and a 40 40 in a ninety percent and a ninety percent in a pure round i can hear the the different tones in each of those and how they diminish just slightly as you go down there's also an app for android which allows you to test a coin based on its sound frequency when pinged so basically you do that same test that i was doing up to the mic but you do it to the phone microphone and with this with this app and i don't have an android so i can't really show you uh i did see a youtube video on that and you can youtube that and check that out um it seemed to work 50 of the time i don't know how reliable it really is again this test will only tell you if the item that you have has silver in it it will not tell you the purity of the item before i move on to other tests if you're getting any value from this video please hit that like button and consider subscribing all right next up we have measurement coins will wear down over the years but if you bring a comparable coin you're going to be able to compare to the coins you're trying to buy what i recommend doing is looking up the diameter thickness and the weight of the coin that you want this information is on the web so you can check out if you're buying nickels pennies doesn't matter you will be able to find this information you can use a dial caliper like this one to get the diameter and the thickness and compare it to whatever it is that you're buying so the great thing about gold and silver is that they are very heavy metals so if someone is trying to create a fake coin that is difficult to do because if it is too wide of a coin but it's the right thickness then you know something is off if you know if it's the same diameter but it's way thicker than it should be they have to kind of get that to get the weight of the coins that's what's great about gold and silver is that they are heavy metals and it is difficult to duplicate i'm not saying that it's not done but i'm saying that if they get the thickness and the diameter right then something is wrong with the weight and vice versa if they get the weight right and the diameter right something's wrong with the thickness it on and on you can check this out so we're looking at the american silver eagles i have one right here and then we have a morgan setting that aside so american silver eagle contains .999 fine silver and one troy ounce it weighs 31.103 grams the diameter is 40.60 millimeters or 1.598 inches the thickness is 0.117 inches or 2.98 millimeters and our morgan silver content is 0.7734 troy ounces of pure silver the weight is 26.73 grams and that is in like it's perfect condition diameter is 38.11 millimeters or 1.5 inches thickness 2.4 millimeters or zero nine four four inches or zero or point zero .0944 inches so we can just check that out right now and right there we have 1.598 inches or 40.6 millimeters so we know that our diameter is correct on this one if we try to go with the the rim the thickness of it go room to rim and we come out to point one one seven inches try the same thing with our morgan we have 1.5 almost exact and then our thickness we got zero points nine one so there's a little bit taken off um over the years and there i could have just been handling it differently but pretty dang close to its original thickness and size so we know that in terms of diameter and thickness these coins are dead on i think there's like this little card i'll i'll post a picture and where you can find that i think it's on amazon um you can find them on ebay i think they're like 30 bucks anyway you can put your american silver eagle in this card and if it passes through one of the slots then it's good if it doesn't pass through it then it's not good um same thing that the diameter you can put it into this cut out part on the card and if it fits but there's still room you you know that your your coins a little bit fake if it fits just right then you're good so the thickness and the diameter is not these two are not the greatest determiners simply because a coin will wear down over the years especially if you're buying an older one a newer one shouldn't have that much of an issue but think of it as another red flag if your coin that you're buying doesn't measure up ah get it that joke for you so just think of it in terms of another layer of things that you have to do if one of these is failing you know there might be some issue with the silver that you're buying the next test is the weight test and if your diameter checks out fine your thickness checks out fine the weight test will be the determining factor the next way to test silver is weight silver weighs more than its clad counterpart and even its fake counterpart 31.1 grams for one troy ounce of silver and that's the key there troy ounce not ounce so if you know the weight of the silver coin or coins let's say a morgan dollar you can compare it to the morgan dollar that you're buying if you're buying in person i would suggest bringing a little scale like this one it's compact it's battery powered inexpensive and it works really well if the coin weight is off you know something isn't right a brand new morgan dollar would weigh 26.73 grams if you're looking at a worn morgan dollar and it weighs 26.79 grams your spidey senses should be going off similarly so if the coin weighs a lot less than 24 grams less than 24 grams is either indicating a fake silver piece or a clad piece even a really worn down silver coin it's not going to be worn that much to weigh that less and we're talking about um anything in general but specifically to this we're talking about silver dollars and i'm going to do a little test for you all so i have my little compact scale i hit the tear and i have a american silver eagle and that comes to 31.2 grams so it is a tenth of a gram off i wouldn't worry too much if your silver eagles are slightly off i've noticed that i've had some variation of mine [Music] this one is 31.33 and this one here is 31.32 so it's just a couple of tenths of a gram off um off to this side over here i have a clad ike dollar i have just a regular um not a regular but i have a silver shield bu round here and a 1921 silver dollar morgan silver dollar if you have a morgan dollar it should weigh 26.73 grams and due to age mine's a little bit less 26.64 if this coin weighed 26.88 or 27 i would get a little bit worried that i would start checking the dimensions at that point something might be off and we can check this ike dollar and you're gonna notice it's gonna weigh a lot less even though they're the same size it's 22.72 grams so i have a troy ounce silver round this is a silver shield in debt and death they trust it's a bu version and it's one troy ounce so it should weigh 31.1 grams and it comes to 31.25 so it's just either my scale is slightly off by a tenth of a gram or um the weight of the coin is off by tenth of a gram this is just another way you can test your silver i highly recommend this method because if you have a whole bunch of coins that are the same diameter same thickness and they're all weighing the same then you know you have one troy ounce of silver there if the dimensions are off somebody fudged that to make it weigh the same amount as a silver dollar would or as a one troy ounce but you can't fake the dimensions and the weight of the silver it's just not possible because silver has this very specific weight and if you add other things to it you may get it to add to that same amount but the dimensions will always be different either the thickness of the coin or the width of the coin the diameter all objects have a specific gravity and silver's specific gravity is 10.4 through 10.6 and that's for pure silver if you're trying to do something like this with constitutional silver it's going to be around 10.3 because it's not pure silver it's 90 percent no other metals or substances have this specific gravity for pure silver none everything has a unique specific gravity number get the weight in grams of all the silver you want to test i have found that with the scale i used it's not fine enough to get a specific gravity for coins or bars that weigh less than one ounce so i'm going to show you a 10 ounce bar and a silver town kilo just so that you can see how this works alright so what you need is a tub of water you need a scale you need silver to test and then you need some sort of string i use floss only because it is very light and it won't affect the test that much okay so as i said before i usually just use this method for larger bars anything over five ounce works um i found that with one ounce and below it does not work specifically because my scale cannot handle that fine of a weight it can handle a huge amount of weight but it just can't handle the fineness and i haven't been able to find a scale that handles a lot of weight and also goes into very fine measurements all right i'm going to weigh the 10 ounce bar first and it comes out to 310 grams for the weight all right next i'm going to do the kilo and we come out to 1 000 grams exactly so i'm going to take these numbers and we're going to put them on our board okay so now that we have our weights without the water we're gonna put the container of water on to our scale and we're gonna zero it so we're going to wrap up the string around each of the objects and dip it into the water until it's fully submerged but not touching the bottom or the sides all right so we have our first item it's tied onto our string and we're just going to dip it in and it says 96 grams so we don't want it touching the bottom of the sides and it has to be fully submerged in the water so we're going to take that out and record our data you also may have to re-zero the scale as pulling out the silver will take water with it so that might change the water weight especially if you're doing a lot of these so just keep that in mind all right next we're going to do the 10 ounce bar and it looks like we have 30 grams okay here we have our results so the 10 ounce bar weighed 310 grams dry there might have been some issue with that i kind of want to check that again because it comes out to 10.3 and that's just not quite right it's a little bit short of pure silver's weight and i mean i just re-measured and i have 312. so i'm going to change that to 312. okay fixed it so how do you find the specific gravity is you take the weight of the item just by itself divide it by the weight that was in the water and you get the specific gravity so it's 10.4 for the 10 ounce bar 10.4 for the silvertown kilo which is just barely in the range for pure silver again the specific gravity test due to the scale that i use it does not really work i mean even this one is kind of fudging up a little bit i think it goes like every it doesn't go specific to individual grams it kept going up by two i got the numbers it works but if you're trying this with anything less than an ounce i think you're going to have problems unless you have a very heavy duty scale that can go read fine measurements and finally one of the best test methods to use on your gold and silver is to use a precious metals verifier like a sigma these are expensive and at a minimum their base model you're shelling out 600 bucks their probe model can be had for 1600 you may be able to find them cheaper too but you kind of have to shop around if you don't want to buy one i understand a coin dealer may allow you to use theirs but they usually charge you for it i've seen some charge 20 bucks or so to run the test on a coin depending upon the dealer if you have a better relationship with your dealer they may you know allow you to do it a lot more at a cheaper price if you don't know them and they don't know you they're going to charge you for it and you're gonna have to deal with that it electromagnetically tests the metal of the gold silver bar and or coin non-invasively these have various settings and allow you to test all percentages of silver and gold and american coins going all the way back to the 1700s they also test large silver and gold bars and rounds what is great about the sigma and other precious metals analyzers is one is able to determine the purity of the item they're testing no other tests mentioned in this video except for the specific gravity test verify purity they only verify that they are indeed silver it doesn't tell you the percentage the amount while these analyzers are fallible these are probably the most accurate of all the tests i have mentioned in this video and will help you the most in determining the authenticity of the item you're testing that was a long ass video kudos to you if you stuck with me this entire time i will have a video out soon about eight ways to test for fake gold so keep an eye out for that one also if you haven't checked out the gold gaw i have going on you should probably do that the thumbnail looks like this hit that like button if you like this video smash it if it's something that you're into hit that bell and subscribe if you aren't already thank you all so much for watching campbell's coins and that is my two cents [Music] you

Channel: Campbell's Coins

Views: 767

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: silver, testing for fake silver, 8 ways to test for fake silver, fake silver, testing silver, sigma, precious metals analyzer, precious metals verifier, fake coins, constitutional silver, junk silver, Morgan dollar, silver dollar, how does silver sound, silver sound, clad vs silver, clad versus silver, counterfeit silver, counterfeit coins, silver pours, 90% silver, specific gravity for silver, sterling silver, ice test for silver, circulated silver, sound test silver, coin

Id: rvAyK3Ol-dc

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020