Gold how to tell if its real

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Does anyone know what is meant when 100mills comes to gold? Ive got a small bar of gold that im not one bit sure if it is gold, do any of know to tell if is real myself?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_p ... _100_mills

Mass spectrometry.

gold testing kits,

they can be bhougt fairly cheap online but if its a one off deal you might get better luck at your local goldsmith.

Weigh it on a scale, then find the amount of water it displaces in a container/

From this you can calculate density- g/cm^3

1 cm^3 = 1ml of water. So you just divide mass (in grams) by the ml of water it raised and you have the density.

19.32 g/cm3 should be your result for pure gold.

Edit:**

Looks like you have one of those "plated" bars, usually scrap plated with a fine layer of gold..

Still... the density will let you know roughly which metal is inside!

Ha. Well lets not be too hasty.. you need to vaporize something to run it through a spectrometer!

nolecular amounts yes, any meaningfull amount? no.


unfortunetely it seems milled bars are plated so if you do a simple gold test on it using test kits it would return the purity of the plating and not the metal inside.
there is an indicator that tells you if there is a high probability of plating, aqua regia.

You might be careful taking it to a gold buying place too. It would be awful easy to tell you it's just gold-plated and lowball you an offer, then turn around and make a tidy profit if it turns out it isn't.

which is why you go to an actual goldsmith or jewweler and not some low down cash 4 gold scam(they are basically scams)

Measure its mass and volume, divide one by the other. If you get over 19 grams per cubic centimeter, it's pretty solid... or filled with something of higher value. If not, well, at least you can figure out what metal or alloy it is instead.

Only a small amount is required for a mass spectroscopy test.

ruveyn

The two main metals which would have a similar density to gold are tungsten and uranium.

Yes, it could also be filled with osmium or platinum. Fortunately the gods blessed us with the hammer, which is able to tell gold apart from all of these. I had written quite a long text about how to specifically tell tungsten and uranium from gold, when I realized hammering it savagely would be the easier choice no matter what.
Edit: I can't imagine a gold bar would lose substantial value from being deformed. At worst it would have to be remelted.

+1 computer-science-applied-to-real-world-problems-counter

Your gold lost quite a bit of its value the moment it left the control of the vault and ceased to be 'good delivery'. Because it could now have been tampered with, it can only recover good delivery status by being melted and recast by a recognised refiner.

For this reason most gold never leaves the vault and most owners will never even see their gold. Excluding tiny amounts used in electronics and medicine and slightly larger amounts used in jewellry, the sole purpose of gold is to be imprisoned in vaults. It's morally questionable to be tying up so much wealth in something which does nothing, although unlike cash it does have the advantage that the Government can't print any more of it.

Edit: and this sounds like plated base metal anyway. It's bling I suppose.

Why is everyone on my case about this? I recognize that you don't need to atomize the entire bar, but if it IS gold I wouldn't want to be the one to suggest cutting a piece off and losing X amount of money in doing so.

Also it makes a gold bar look like crap if you are missing a corner.

#1: Take said piece of gold and put it on a table.

#2: find a rock or hammer or other such hard object and try to crush a piece of the gold.

If the "gold" crushes into powder or chunks, it's not gold.

If the "gold" squishes a bit, it's gold.

Old placer miners trick....

*EDIT*

I know of a placer mine that uses a gold bar spray painted black as a door stopper.....

Placer mining has been one of my "special interests" for a few years...