You either want to know how much your silver is worth or you may want to check if your silver coin is authentic. Good examples are Morgan Dollar Silver coins weighing 26.73 gram or American Silver Eagle coins weighing 31.1 gram. Both coins are being counterfeited quite often and verifying the actual weight may give you a good hint if your coin is authentic or not. If the measured weight is off by 0.1 g to 0.2 g you may be fine but if the weight of your coin is off significantly, you may have run into a fake.

Know The Weights Before You Weigh

A weight check only works if you know what the coin is supposed to weigh. These are the standards worth memorising, and every one of them is inside the range of a 0.1 gram scale:

• Pre-1965 dime – 2.50 g, 90% silver
• Pre-1965 quarter – 6.25 g, 90% silver
• Pre-1965 half dollar – 12.50 g, 90% silver
• 1965 to 1970 Kennedy half – 11.50 g, and only 40% silver
• Morgan and Peace dollar – 26.73 g, 90% silver
• American Silver Eagle – 31.10 g, 99.9% silver

Notice the 1965 to 1970 Kennedy half. It looks like the older halves, it is stamped like them, and plenty of people sell them as 90% silver by mistake. It is 40%, and it weighs a gram less. Your scale catches that in two seconds.

One more thing about circulated coins: decades of pocket wear removes metal. A genuine, well-worn Morgan can read a little light. That is normal. A coin reading heavy, or light by a lot, is the one to question.

Why Weight Alone Is Not Proof

Be honest with yourself about what a scale can and cannot do. Weighing is the fastest first filter there is, and it catches the cheap fakes, which are most of them. But the better counterfeits are made to the correct weight on purpose, because the forgers know this test too.

So treat a correct weight as permission to keep going, not as a verdict. Check the diameter and thickness against the mint specification. Silver is not magnetic, so a strong magnet should not stick at all. And for anything genuinely valuable, pay a dealer for a real opinion. The scale tells you when to stop worrying about the obvious fakes and start asking the harder questions.

Read The Mark

Scrap silver is a different job from coins. Here you are reading fineness marks, usually on the underside of a spoon, the base of a candlestick, or inside a ring:

• 999 – fine silver, 99.9%. Bars and rounds.
• 925, STERLING or STER – sterling, 92.5%. Most flatware, hollowware and jewelry.
• 900 – coin silver, 90%.
• 800 or 830 – common on European pieces, 80% and 83%.
• EPNS, A1, quadruple plate, silver on copper – these are silverplate. A microscopically thin layer of silver over base metal, and worth essentially nothing as scrap.

That last line is the one that disappoints people. A heavy, handsome Victorian tray stamped EPNS has real decorative value but almost no melt value. It will still register beautifully on your scale, which is exactly why the mark matters as much as the weight.

What Your Silver Is Actually Worth

The arithmetic is the same as gold, and silver is quoted per troy ounce too. One troy ounce is 31.1 grams:

1. Silver price per gram. At $70 per troy ounce, that is about $2.25 per gram of pure silver.
2. Multiply by fineness. Sterling is 92.5%, so $2.25 x 0.925 = about $2.08 per gram of sterling.
3. Multiply by weight. A 500 gram box of sterling flatware works out at roughly $1,040.

Check the current silver price before you run it. Silver moves faster and further than gold in percentage terms, so a figure from last month can be well out of date.

The Weighted Handle Trap

This one costs estate sellers real money. Sterling knife handles are almost always hollow and filled with pitch, cement or plaster to give them heft. The same goes for many candlesticks and some trophy bases. They are often stamped weighted or reinforced.

The filler is not silver and no refiner will pay you for it. If you weigh a canteen of cutlery as one lump, you are counting several hundred grams of cement as precious metal and you will be disappointed by the offer. Weigh the knives and weighted pieces separately from the spoons and forks, and treat their number as a rough guide only.

Sort Before You Weigh

The same rule that applies to gold applies here. Keep your 999 bullion, your sterling, your coin silver and your plate in four separate piles and weigh each one on its own. A mixed heap invites a buyer to price the whole lot at the lowest fineness in it, and there is no way to argue back once it is all jumbled together.