What is the specific gravity of precious metals and how does it affect the price

Have you acci­den­tal­ly seen a beau­ti­ful ring made of plat­inum and you intend to get a copy of it, but in the gold ver­sion of the pre­cious met­al? Or do you want to dupli­cate 585 gold ear­rings from raw plat­inum? Mod­ern jew­el­ers will be able to ful­fill any whim, but at the same time, the price for the work can be an unex­pect­ed sur­prise for the cus­tomer. With such a break­down, both the cost of a gram of met­al and its spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty play a sig­nif­i­cant role.

What it is?

Pre­cious met­als in nature are prac­ti­cal­ly not observed in their purest form. As a rule, their com­po­si­tion includes var­i­ous impu­ri­ties that direct­ly affect the final price of jew­el­ry prod­ucts made from such raw mate­ri­als.

The alloy, where a small num­ber of oth­er addi­tions are observed, is char­ac­ter­ized by a high­er proof — 999. From this fol­lows the con­clu­sion that, for exam­ple, gold of 999 proof should have a greater val­ue than oth­er alloys. And it is this gold that will set the tone for pric­ing per gram of all pre­cious met­als.

Key features

Each of the pre­cious met­als has cer­tain phys­i­cal and mechan­i­cal para­me­ters. It is these indi­ca­tors that allow spe­cial­ists to mark their so-called spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty. All jew­el­ry of iden­ti­cal vol­ume, made of dif­fer­ent met­als, dif­fer in weight. The den­si­ty of each indi­vid­ual alloy is deter­mined by a spe­cial for­mu­la and has a great influ­ence on the cal­cu­la­tion of the spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty of the met­al.

At the same time, it is worth not­ing that it is very imprac­ti­cal to make jew­el­ry from pure met­al. For exam­ple, gold and sil­ver are char­ac­ter­ized by exces­sive soft­ness, and there­fore they need improve­ment. By increas­ing strength and wear resis­tance, chang­ing the tonal­i­ty of col­or, spe­cial­ists direct­ly affect the sam­ple of raw mate­ri­als, which ulti­mate­ly affects the final cost of the fin­ished jew­el­ry.

Indicators of the specific weight of the most popular precious metals

If we talk about the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of pre­cious met­als, then in this case you should pay atten­tion to the fol­low­ing para­me­ters:

• strength;
• elec­tri­cal and ther­mal con­duc­tiv­i­ty;
• plas­tic­i­ty;
• bright­ness and char­ac­ter­is­tic shine.

It is the mea­sure­ment of these indi­ca­tors that is tak­en into account when work­ing with alloys in jew­el­ry. Not­ing the most com­mon met­als used as the main raw mate­ri­als, the fol­low­ing can be not­ed:

Gold is char­ac­ter­ized by a high degree of den­si­ty and heav­i­ness, which auto­mat­i­cal­ly puts it in 7th place among oth­er met­als. As already men­tioned, its only draw­back is soft­ness, which is “cor­rect­ed” by adding var­i­ous impu­ri­ties. It must be said that due to the high spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty of gold, its extrac­tion is quite prof­itable.

This met­al, extreme­ly resis­tant to cor­ro­sion, is char­ac­ter­ized by low resis­tance. Despite the fact that it, like gold, is soft, its spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty and den­si­ty are also quite high.

• plat­inum - the spe­cif­ic grav­i­ty of this met­al is con­sid­ered one of the high­est — 21.45 g per cubic cen­time­ter.

Among oth­er things, it is char­ac­ter­ized by increased fire resis­tance and at the same time does not under­go defor­ma­tion process­es. The unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of plat­inum make it pos­si­ble to make alloys with a high con­tent of plat­inum in fin­ished prod­ucts.

Spe­cial tables of the den­si­ty of met­als and alloys allow jew­el­ers to accu­rate­ly deter­mine the future price of the prod­uct with which they have to work. These data are well known to spe­cial­ists, but not always known to ordi­nary con­sumers.