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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 8493, member: 25&quot;]Just to correct evelyn&#039;s description of GF as <i>electroplate</i> here is a bit of an explanation of rolled gold or &#039;gold filled&#039;.</p><p><br /></p><p>1/20th GF (or rolled gold) is a sandwich of (say) 1 inch of copper or brass and 1/20th inch of gold sweated together (in effect&nbsp; glued with solder) and then rolled out thinner and thinner till it reaches the required thickness for use, say 2/100ths of an inch thick. That original 1/20th inch sheet of gold is now 50 times thinner or 1 thousandth of an inch thick.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thicker than plating which&nbsp; can&nbsp; be only a few atoms thick and as durable as cotton candy, but still the same proportion of gold to base metal as it started off.&nbsp; The quality of rolled gold items is measured by that 1/20th or whatever figure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Pocket watch cases used to be rated as so many years wear (before the brass substrate showed through), a cheap case would be&nbsp; 5 years, a top quality case 25 years.</p><p><br /></p><p>Obviously the carat of the gold casing would be whatever they&nbsp; started with in the original gold sheet, so gold filled can be any carat.</p><p><br /></p><p>With the high price of gold even gold filled items may be worth scrapping, but prices will be pretty low due to the pot luck effect of various standards of gold filled and the variable amounts of gold that will have worn away. The only&nbsp; fair way to do it is to refine first and pay according to the amount of gold recovered. This is&nbsp; not something usually available to the average punter.</p><p><br /></p><p>Terms for &#039;goldish&#039; stuff are all over the place nowadays with the obnoxious term &#039;gold tone&#039; so common. You can pretty well rely on anything not being clearly defined in relation to some common standard like fractional gold filled values will, if it has any gold at&nbsp; all, be of that cotton candy durability and probably contain less gold to weight than the gold ore originally mined.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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