hi guys Chris at the hill tomorrow so ah
here's a selection of old cutlery silver
plate possibly silver souvenir spoons
some of the corroded tarnished do you
know what's valuable and what's just
junk well I'll give you a bit of a guide
as to the common items we found in
Australia and there are treasures to be
found with your emerging through
granny's cutlery drawer or cleaning out
a house lot or just like doing a bit of
treasure hunting adopt shops or or
thrift stores or whatever you call them
in your part of the world there's
certainly treasures to be found so I'll
take you through these and show you what
to look for what's not worth much and
perhaps what is the best ones to to keep
okay most silver plate stuff or silver
stuff will tarnish and you'll learn to
recognize the silvery look pretty
quickly but we've always look at the
marks and there are literally thousands
of marks for silver plate companies or
or indeed silversmiths around the world
a couple of things we can do for a start
just to discount the effort to read
small print the base metal if there's
any corrosion this one here also shows a
bit of a bit of fur degree that's
because of the copper in the base metal
and that certainly indicates it as not
sterling silver or indeed any grade of
silver this one in fact is actually a
brass base metal so you can discount
some of them straight up another thing
to look for is where you can see this
one the plating is worn through to the
base metal so again there's really not
much point trying to decipher marks when
you know clearly that it's not solid
silver little spoon here as well they
often wear on the contact points just
purely from years have been used so no
need to worry about those the other
thing to discount straight away is
stainless steel now most of them say
stainless steel this one says 1810 which
is grade of stainless
some of these are magnetic but not all
stainless steel this magnetic so but
certainly if you can recognize it
stainless steel discount that one as
well
so looking at the marks what we need to
identify is what all the marks mean now
that's a big effort to understand them
all here's some basics you'll find this
one very often epns which stands for
electroplated nickel silver the
electroplate is a silver plating but the
base metal is what's called nickel
silver and I think there's one here that
actually says I get that the focus
actually says nickel silver now nickel
silver is an alloy of copper and nickel
and zinc so there's actually no real
silver in the base metal even though
it's called nickel silver this one here
I'll try and zoom in on these a bit
better if I can this one here's a lot of
marks looks pretty impressive but you
can see a penis there so that's a nickel
silver base metal the most common one
you'll see is just a penis here's
another one
the penis a one is the quality or the
the refers to the thickness of the
silver plating interestingly if we look
back to this brass when we had before it
actually says EP a1 so it doesn't say
nickel silver because we know it's brass
so he P again stands for electroplate
sorting through some of these other ones
peninsula plate epns a1 so you'll see
that these are the most common and the
moment you recognize epns you'll know
that it's not sold to but this one just
says eNOS for nickel silver this
teaspoon here now this is where a lot of
them actually try to trick you because
it does say in the middle layer epns but
it's in so there
at Fonte and they stamped in much like
silver hallmarks so I guess it was a
marketing ploy to make people think that
they were getting a better quality or
even a still in silver piece when in
fact it wasn't it also says super a1 so
if you see I won anyway you know it's
just plated and there's other one here
just says I won Dixon was the brand and
the trumpet stamping is actually a
trademark of Dixon so whilst it does
look like a silver hallmark it is just
plated so that gives you a guide to the
plate now these other ones I have here
the ones I've actually found in op shops
this one has silver hallmarks now you
can see the anchor there is for
Birmingham the K is the date letter and
this one is an English spoon and they're
dated to 1959 and it's about about 8
grams of sterling silver there so that
one's well worth grabbing there's
another one here a souvenir spoon and
again this haul marks on the bowl which
is more typical when they're when they
are quality silver items and that's a
Birmingham one as well so sterling
silver again this New Zealand souvenir
spoon was founded a an op shop on one of
my travels and again there's the
hallmarks on the bowl of the spoon and
again it's Birmingham the date code
dates this one to 1926 so value of these
this one weighs around about fourteen
and a half grams as a rough guide you
could work on $0.50 a gram for a scrap
value so you know seven or eight dollars
for scrap silver much better than 50
cents for a souvenir spoon and I think I
might have even paid 20 cents at an op
shop
so here's another one where we don't
have this one's a fork quite an old one
we don't have your hallmarks and the
bowl obviously hasn't got a bowl but
it's up the back we'd normally find
these plated hallmarks
but this one is English silver and it
dates very early I was very pleased to
find this one
now that the hallmarks indicate that
it's actually 1816 Georgian silver in
London silversmith it weighs about 70 70
grams so even a scrap value you're
looking at 40 to $50 script silver so
that was a good little find so it's
always worth coming through them because
other than the fact that that one's been
polished if you compare them to some of
these other Forks there's really not
much difference so it's worthwhile
getting to know the hallmarks the
indicators for what's plate and what
isn't and you can find some treasures
when you're next digging around in a
cutlery drawer all right thanks for
watching I hope you learned something
from that
as I said the hallmarks are many and
varied you could study your life and
still not know them all but this gives
you a basic guide you know that if you
see the EP or a1 or electro plate or
something long as any even the wood
plate you only just got a piece that's
probably in the 50 Cent's box
so um ask any questions if you want to
know more I'll do a few more videos on
helping you out with these sort of
things and subscribe to my channel and
give us a thumbs up if you liked it I
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see you in the next video