Featured Help Id Silver plaque with coat of arms engraved

If it was Leonor Arnó Pons, I can only say, she knows her stuff. Which can't be said of all Catawiki experts, I agree, but some are good, and Leonor is one of the good ones.
Leonor is also a valued member of the Ethnic Jewels forum, and has written about Berber jewellery.

 

Very nice, Hunting.

Or English. But it is probably my bad influence.
Next word is 'sieraden', Dutch for jewellery.

 

All is forgiven, as long as you learn Dutch.

 

I hope for him that it's silver.
but about those "experts" - this is not my experience with catawiki AT ALL. be it toys, art nouveau pewter and copper stuff, small enamel paintings "from Sèvres" - completely on the wrong side of things. furthermore huge problems with getting the money back even when they were proven wrong.
tried it and gave it a go till I lost 2000 € in half a year - and guess where those "experts" sat...

 

that's true, many around. give you another example - lot-tissimo. earlier-on - 3 to 4 years ago - only German and a few Swiss auction houses of good standing; today crappo from the Netherlands ( still missing 1200 € from a guy in Eindhoven) or merry old England (300 £ from a Greek in Eastbourne, who was even kicked out of one of the telly shows) etc.

and then there comes - tata trumpet and drumroll - the EC alcoholics and install an online page for solving such stuff .... but as usual a complete betrayal of the public. what you get is an email after ~ three months (to make sure that nobody finds the postal tracking numbers online) with ONE line - sorry we couldn't do anything for you. good bye.

 

Very sorry to hear that, Fid, that really sounds like the school of financial hard knocks.

Might I recommend a very nice site, antiquers.com, with some very knowledgeable people, before your next buy? A pretty nice crowd as well.
But seriously, we are always here to help, as you know. Best to ask before you bid though.

 

it's not the financial side of the business that gets on my family jewels, it's the abuse of those lads. and the time you lose.
earlier-on at the start of ebay when there was ONE ebay only without the national platforms, it was trust against trust. I sent over 100 $ in a jewelcase somewhere in the US - marked as gift of course - and got the item just fine; the best I ever had was a Spaniard where I received the item even before he received my payment; when I asked him about it: oh it's okay, the Swiss always pay, no problem...
the worst I had was a guy from Belgium that wrote perfect German till the problems started. then he changed to that "Dutch" or whatevr they speak, then to some unintelligable sort of French. in the end I made a Belgian lawyer write him a letter - was about 2600 € - which made clear that he was in the German Community and that he will bring him to court in Eupen when he doesn't pay immediately back my money and the lawyers fee. didn't take 5 days till the money was back in my account...

 

The Eupen Belgians often speak Flemish Dutch and Walloon French as well as their own Eupen German dialect. They can switch from one to the other at the drop of a hat, but most don't do it to deceive, of course. Good that you got him to pay up though. Now for the others.

 

the two problems at the moment are both in the Netherlands. I asked a lawyer near the German border, but it seems they are a rip-off. England is useless as well, the travel expenses are far too high, and their small courts system etc. is a PITA for every reasonable person, to say the least.
and then I should speak English ? here an example of good English.

 

I'm sure you'll do fine with that level of English. The audience seemed to know what he was talking about, or they were extremely polite. Or maybe it wasn't loud applause I heard, but a tropical rain downpour on a tin roof.

Do you have something like legal aid insurance?

 

Americans pay for a lot of things with credit cards just in case; if something goes wrong, the credit card company goes after the seller for you ... and those guys are the proverbial 900-pound gorillas.

 

legal aid only for car accidents. I once informed about it, but it didn't pay out under 50'000 a year. most of my stuff is between 400 and 5000 and most of it for my private collection. so no use really.
I simply buy and sell a bit to keep up with the spending on my own collection. and having an addresss in the EC for buying and one in Switzerland for selling is sometimes handy as well...

 

"I'm sure you'll do fine with that level of English."
but I'm not paid as much as this eejet ! just imagine, he is the current European Commissioner for Budget and Human Resources...
and here his boss...

 

So do Europeans. I always pay with my credit card if I can, most people here do.
I find Central Europeans are slowly warming to the card as well, but often still ask to be paid by bank.

 

Meanwhile, Americans are almost uniformly distrustful of pay by bank and for good reason sometimes.

BTW - whoever put that platform and those stairs up (in Fid's video) should be keel-hauled. I wouldn't have been able to get up them without help either with my current level of nerve damage. The guy who needed the help looked like he has Parkinson's. Nerve damage and stairs do NOT mix.

 

Hello, could you please suggest me a nice silver tester on Amazon for a purchase? I don't trust shops on the road in my area. Thanks for your advices.

 

Most people I know use acid kits to test silver. They're all pretty much alike - a ceramic "stone" to scrape the metal on and small bottles of acid. Jewelry dealers use the 18k gold acid to test silver with. When hit with the acid, silver turns white and "curdles". Don't test on the piece unless you're fairly sure it's plated and you just want to burn through so no one else mistakes it for anything good.