So I found a couple junk rings during one of my earlier hunts and the other day I was cleaning them up a bit to add them to the junk-jewelry box. One was a big ugly clunker, the other really small (almost too small for my pinky, and I have really thin fingers!) with a some obviously glass or cz stones and some plating chipping off of it.
Now the TK4 has no opinion about which metal is which, but I had figured the small ring must be junk-- heavily corroded, sand and shell bits stuck to it, obvious plating, right?
But as I'm chipping sand out of the inside I uncover a mark- "925"
Was this ring somebody's scam? You don't put the 925 on stuff that's just silver plated, right?
So I painstakingly grind through the layers of corrosion and polish it up. Sure enough-- silver. Huh. Then what was up with the plating? I'd never heard of somebody plating silver. I mean, it's already silver, right?
So since the ring has words on it I do some quick googling in Japanese and find the original ring.
Yep- Rhodium Plated silver with CZ and rose quartz.
I freely admit I didn't even remember Rhodium was an element on the periodic table, so I had to do a little more research.
Apparently it's very shiny, very valuable en masse (though only a negligible amount is used in plating), and very brittle. It's most commonly used on low K gold to give it a pure-white shine.
Thing is- it can't take a beating. It will crack and chip off pretty easily. Putting it on silver seems like a really bad idea since silver is pretty soft and, ya know, already shines pretty white on its own.
So I'm curious-- have the rest of you jewelry-hunters run into Rhodium plated stuff before? Is it at all common? Have you ever seen it survive the ocean? Would the folks at ARA (or another refinery) have any problem taking rhodium plated PM items (not sending my silver in, but wondering for future reference)?
Now the TK4 has no opinion about which metal is which, but I had figured the small ring must be junk-- heavily corroded, sand and shell bits stuck to it, obvious plating, right?
But as I'm chipping sand out of the inside I uncover a mark- "925"
Was this ring somebody's scam? You don't put the 925 on stuff that's just silver plated, right?
So I painstakingly grind through the layers of corrosion and polish it up. Sure enough-- silver. Huh. Then what was up with the plating? I'd never heard of somebody plating silver. I mean, it's already silver, right?
So since the ring has words on it I do some quick googling in Japanese and find the original ring.
Yep- Rhodium Plated silver with CZ and rose quartz.
I freely admit I didn't even remember Rhodium was an element on the periodic table, so I had to do a little more research.
Apparently it's very shiny, very valuable en masse (though only a negligible amount is used in plating), and very brittle. It's most commonly used on low K gold to give it a pure-white shine.
Thing is- it can't take a beating. It will crack and chip off pretty easily. Putting it on silver seems like a really bad idea since silver is pretty soft and, ya know, already shines pretty white on its own.
So I'm curious-- have the rest of you jewelry-hunters run into Rhodium plated stuff before? Is it at all common? Have you ever seen it survive the ocean? Would the folks at ARA (or another refinery) have any problem taking rhodium plated PM items (not sending my silver in, but wondering for future reference)?
