The Urban Survivalist

With everything that's going on in the world and in the economy this is probably the worst time to start getting quiet. I have tried to make a few posts but they all end up being rants. I don't want the blog to devolve into that. My baby is also getting to that age where she's a lot of fun to play with so I've been devoting most of my free time to her. Don't forget that there are three years worth of posts in the backlog and there's a search box in the sidebar in case you're looking for something specific. Maybe I've covered it already. I'm sure that I'll get in the mood for regular posts again soon. For now, though, I'm just kind of taking a break. I just didn't want you guys thinking that I abandoned the blog or something.

So you've started buying gold. You know how to identify the gold content in pieces of jewelry by the stamps and the weight. Sometimes you run into broken pieces of jewelry. Some pieces don't even have a stamp but the owner swears that they're real. Maybe you're trying to buy a coin that you're not sure about. So what do you do to make sure that you know what you're buying? Never fear. There's a very inexpensive solution. Just get a gold acid test kit. You can get them from Amazon or Ebay for around $30-$40. So what do you get? There are a lot of different varieties of kits that you can get. The kits generally consist of several bottles of acid and an acid test stone. Some kits will also include a digital scale and/or a jeweler's loop (which can be a great value if you don't have either). Some also come with extra acids. You can get acids to test silver, platinum, 10k, 14k, 18k and 22k gold. The cheapest kits come with 10k, 14k and 18...