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I have a few herring bone necklaces that are marked Italy 925 that have a slight magnetic pull on a 130 pound pull magnet. This doesn't show up with my smaller pocket magnet with about a 15 pound pull, I don't carry the 130 lb around with me.

Any ideas why this is? What do I do with this stuff, will any refiner take it? What do I do?

Edit: This isn't at the clasp, its in the "meat" of the necklace.

Verbane wrote:I have a few herring bone necklaces that are marked Italy 925 that have a slight magnetic pull on a 130 pound pull magnet. This doesn't show up with my smaller pocket magnet with about a 15 pound pull, I don't carry the 130 lb around with me.

Any ideas why this is? What do I do with this stuff, will any refiner take it? What do I do?

A man with a box of instruments at his disposal.......First, hats off for that one.

Second, this is just regurgitated info that a very smart forum member whose livelihood is dealing in and refining PM told me just a short while back during a telephone conversation.

“Doc you will be good with flatware... it will assay out as stamped most of the time. BUT, be careful with jewelry. It has a tendency to be manufactured with less stringent guidelines and I often find all sorts of metal in there.. including iron.. furthermore the assay will sometimes reveal lower quality material than what was stamped. So proceed with caution on those purchases......test, test, test. ”

I have been lucky and not picked up anything "light" yet on the silver deals.....I have, however, had my buns toasted a good one on a gold ring purchase. That will not happen again

Rodebaugh wrote:Doc you will be good with flatware... it will assay out as stamped most of the time. BUT, be careful with jewelry. It has a tendency to be manufactured with less stringent guidelines

I second this. Sterling jewelry is suprisingly inconsistent.

Rodebaugh wrote:I have been lucky and not picked up anything "light" yet on the silver deals.....I have, however, had my buns toasted a good one on a gold ring purchase.

Same here. Buying gold filled as solid gold makes for one really bad day! Once I even bought an electroplated ring as solid gold. At least if you make a mistake with a small piece of "silver" jewelry it's not a big loss.

Verbane wrote:Edit: This isn't at the clasp, its in the "meat" of the necklace.

Ah, this thread is relevant to my interests as I have been sorting thru my small scrap piles, and have noticed that every single clasp is magnetic. Can anyone tell me why that is?

Also, my strongest magnet (neodymium) is probably 10-15 pounds of pull I'd guess. I have one nice chain marked Sterling and it too shows a very weak attraction to the magnet. So this is relatively normal and it's probably .925 anyway? Just got a bit of iron in the mix?

Neodymium magnets have a tendency to attract alloys that normal magnets won't. I've had pieces of yellow brass, jewelry and other non-ferrous items that my Neodymium magnets attracted to but normal magnets would not.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, this is probably do to small amounts of iron and other impurities. A weak attraction is usually not a major issue.

A lot of Italian .925 jewelry is flashed with rhodium to keep it from tarnishing. A nickel underplating goes on before the rhodium plate. This nickel is what makes it slightly magnetic. Don't worry it is almost always legit. Acid test it and it will light up red like all the rest of your silver scrap. This is almost exclusive to Italy however I've seen a few Thai pieces like this too.
Stay away from anything marked China.