Adding jewelry

By the end of this page you can read any hallmark, pick the right alloy for it, and enter a weight WITVT can price. It goes deeper than Value your first item, which walks the wizard end to end.

The details step

After you choose Jewelry on the type step, the details step asks for three things. The Jewelry Type is ring, necklace, bracelet, earring, scrap, bangle, pendant or other; it labels the card and the report and does not change the value. The Item Name is suggested from the alloy and the type, “Gold 14K Ring” for instance, and follows your choices until you type a name of your own. The description is optional and appears on the report.

Reading the hallmark

A hallmark is the small purity stamp inside a ring band, on a clasp, on the back of a pendant, or on the tag of a chain. Find it with a loupe or your phone’s camera zoomed in. Then, on the metal step, type the value from the Type this column into Purity/Alloy and pick the alloy from the list. Gold is listed by karat; silver and platinum by their fineness number.

Gold

Each karat also comes as White and Yellow variants (“Gold 14K White”). They hold the same amount of gold; the difference is the other metals in the alloy, which WITVT also prices when they have a spot price. Pick the plain entry unless you know the piece is white gold. A plumb mark (14KP) guarantees at least the stamped purity; the P does not mean plated.

Silver and platinum

No hallmark?

Pick the alloy you believe it is and treat the result as an estimate. A few checks narrow it down: a magnet sticks to steel but never to gold, silver or platinum; sterling tarnishes dark, platinum does not; gold is much heavier than brass for its size. None of these proves purity. For a piece worth selling, an acid test or XRF settles it, and many buyers test on the spot. When in doubt choose the lower karat, so the number you anchor on is the conservative one.

Weighing

Weigh the whole piece, stones included; stones are entered on the next step and subtracted. Put the scale on a hard, level surface, zero it, and weigh in grams. A kitchen scale that reads to 0.1 g is enough to start; a jeweler’s scale reading to 0.01 g is better for small pieces, where 0.1 g is two percent of a light ring.

Enter the number in Weight and pick the unit. Grams are the default; the menu also has carats, ounces, troy ounces, pennyweight (dwt), kilograms and pounds. Pennyweight is common in the US trade: 1 dwt is 1.555 g, and 20 dwt make a troy ounce. The wizard converts everything to grams for the calculation and shows the weight in the unit you chose.

The alloy details dialog

Once an alloy is selected, a See details about … link appears under the field. It opens a dialog with the alloy’s composition: each metal and its share, and the share that is precious metal. That share is what the hallmark promises and what the price per gram is built from. The same information is on the public alloy pages, with today’s value per gram, pennyweight and troy ounce and a scrap table for common weights: see Alloy prices, or open an alloy there and press Add to workspace to start the wizard with it selected.

Next

• Stones and other materials: entering stones so they come off the metal weight.
• Where the prices come from: how the alloy’s share becomes a price per gram.