How to Find Out the Purity of Gold

Being able to test the purity of your gold is extremely important. Even though jewelry is given a karat rating (10k, 14k, 18k 22k) gold is made to different standards depending on which country it comes from. Additionally if you are doing gold recovery from old computer chips etc you need to be able to confirm the purity of your gold in order that you can sell it. This article gives a simple explanation of how you can do this.

First of all you need to get a gold testing kit. You can get these easily from Amazon or Ebay usually for under $20. The kit includes a test stone, gold test needles and some acid testing solution. The needles are made of different karats of gold. Gold reacts with acid to produce different colored solutions by comparing the reaction of the testing needles with the acid solutions to the reaction of your gold with the acid you can determine what karat it is or if it is pure gold.

If you want to find out the real karat rating of your gold jewelry item then first of all check the item for a hallmark. Lets say you have a ring and it has a 14k hallmark on the inside of the ring.Here is how you confirm that it is really the 14k it says it is.

Take your testing stone and the 14k testing needle and make a small scratch with the needle on the stone. You don't want it to be too large a scratch  so that you can use the stone as much as possible. Then take your gold ring and make another scratch next to the first one.

Then take the testing solution that corresponds to the 14k testing needle. Drop a small amount of the solution on both scratches. The solution should react with the gold deposited on the scratches and should change color. If both scratches are the same color then this confirms that your gold item is indeed 14 karat.

Gold that you have recovered from old CPU chips or mother boards could very well be close to pure. However if you want to sell the scrap gold you need to test its purity as well. The way you do this is very similar to the method used for jewelry you just need to to test a few more options.

If it is likely that your gold is pure then follow the instructions for the testing jewelry but using the needle for pure gold. If the results are negative then test it for 22k, then 18k, 14k and 10k until you find the exact karat rating. Even though the gold used in the CPU chip may have once been pure, if you have recovered this gold by chemical means there may be  impurities mixed in with the gold still making it less than pure.