The legendary ring of Solomon has become a popular product on the Internet. Everyone can join in with eternal wisdom - some jewelry costs mere pennies, and you can buy King Solomon's ring with the click of a button. And some lucky owners of jewelry are quite happy when the inscription on King Solomon’s ring in Latin is made with an error, what else can you expect for such a price?
One of the popular materials is tungsten. Judging by the colorful descriptions, the Ring of Solomon made of tungsten does not burn in fire, does not sink in water, is not beaten with a hammer, is not sawed with a saw, pleases the owner with its impeccability for an eternity and causes the burning envy of others. If everything is clear with gold and silver, then tungsten raises many questions:
- Firstly, it is not clear why some tungsten rings can be bought for symbolic money, while others are sold at the price of precious metals.
- Secondly, how colorful advertising corresponds to reality? If you believe the promises of sellers, any tungsten products have super properties, regardless of their cost.
Which is better – classic precious metals or tungsten. Maybe it’s time for gold and silver to move on, making way for a new jewelry champion?
Everything you need to know about tungsten
Beautiful words and eloquent promises often turn into a wrapper, under which unassuming content is hidden. Let's try to figure out tungsten rings: where is the myth and where is the truth?
1. MYTH. Sellers of tungsten jewelry often refer to their products as "jewelry."
FACT. Tungsten products are not jewelry!
According to the international classification of metals, a Solomon ring is considered a piece of jewelry if it is made exclusively of noble metals - gold, silver or platinum. Everything else is just jewelry.
2. MYTH. Tungsten rings are of impeccable quality
FACT. Unfortunately, the degree of “impeccability” of the quality of a tungsten alloy is determined during wear.
Pure tungsten, gold or silver are not used in jewelry. And, if the production of Solomon's Ring from gold and silver is under the strict eye of government supervision, then the situation with tungsten is very complicated.
Today, there are no standards for the composition of tungsten alloys; everyone “chemicalizes” jewelry made from it to their own taste. Almost always, the manufacturer writes that the ring is made of “tungsten carbide”; in fact, this alloy can contain any carbide-containing production waste and scrap. Please note that high-quality tungsten carbide is not magnetic.
There is a possibility that such jewelry will not turn the skin green, will not cause allergies, and will not peel off in a couple of weeks.
3. MYTH. Tungsten rings cannot be destroyed
FACT. The tungsten ring is strong but fragile: it does not break, but it does crack.
The videos posted online where they try to saw and distort King Solomon’s tungsten ring are very impressive. It is difficult to imagine where in real life the ring could encounter such terrible overloads. No sane person would think of crushing his gold ring of Solomon with a vice or hitting it with a hammer to make sure that it really wrinkles.
Yes, gold will be crushed, and this is its advantage - precious metals are soft and ductile, so they do not break. But tungsten, when dropped from a height onto a tiled floor, can shatter into fragments, just like a cast iron plate - in metals, high fragility coexists with strength. Now think about what happens more often in the life of a piece of jewelry – falling on the floor or getting hit directly with a hammer?
4. MYTH. Tungsten rings cannot be scratched
FACT. It is possible to scratch a tungsten ring, but it is difficult.
Theoretically, tungsten rings are “indestructible”. Ordinary household appliances - knives, forks, scissors - will never leave deep grooves on them. However, this does not mean that King Solomon’s tungsten ring can only be scratched with a diamond—metal tools can handle this material as well.
Gold and silver are significantly inferior to tungsten in wear resistance and quickly become covered with a network of microscopic abrasions, but this does not spoil the appearance of the products. On the contrary, many deliberately treat the newly purchased jewelry carelessly so that it takes on a lively and natural appearance, because a shiny ring looks defiantly new.
If desired, any Solomon ring (whether gold or silver was used in its manufacture does not matter) can be polished in a jewelry salon in a matter of minutes, it will look as if it had just been taken from a display case.
5. MYTH. Tungsten rings last forever
FACT. Alas, it will be possible to confirm or refute this statement only after a couple of thousand years. But sputtering on tungsten jewelry is not very durable.
Tungsten products fade and wear out over time, especially for gold-tone products. The beautiful color inscription “everything will pass, this too will pass”, applied to the surface of Solomon’s tungsten ring, with its slow and gradual disappearance, will emphasize the philosophical meaning of this saying. You buy a ring with an inscription, after a year it is absolutely clean. Indeed, “everything will pass, this too will pass”...
Solomon's ring made of gold or silver behaves more predictably. The letters made by casting are part of the ring; they cannot be destroyed or erased.
6. MYTH. Tungsten jewelry retains its shape
FACT. It is actually impossible to bend, stretch or reduce the tungsten Solomon ring - this causes a lot of inconvenience to its owner.
A tungsten ring will always remain perfectly round. Due to their impeccable shape, tungsten rings at first feel like an alien band on your hand and often fly off your fingers. The size of the tungsten ring must be suitable, because it cannot be changed! If you get the size wrong, the jewelry will quickly fall off your finger to find another owner.
Products made from precious metals are crumpled to fit their owner by microscopic fractions of a millimeter - they “fit to the figure”, like comfortable jeans. An error with the size is a trifle; in any salon, a Solomon ring made of gold or silver will be enlarged or reduced in a matter of minutes.
7. MYTH. Tungsten rings are inexpensive and beautiful
FACT. Tungsten jewelry looks corresponding to its price: inexpensive - ugly, beautiful - more expensive than silver!
In all the pictures, the Tungsten Solomon Rings look very aesthetically pleasing - heavy, solid, shiny and impressive. Only high-quality tungsten products are worth their weight in silver!
So future owners of King Solomon’s ring should think about it: is it worth buying beautiful jewelry if you can afford a real piece of jewelry for the same money? You will also be able to save money!
Gold Delusions – 28: Tungsten Gold Bars and Rusty Gold Victorious
Good afternoon, Dmitry Balkovsky is with you again, Goldenfront.ru, this is the twenty-eighth issue of golden delusions, today is September 14, 2021. Today we are again talking about fake gold and rusty gold Victorious - two of these topics are always popular among gold savers.
Thanks for the tip to our regular viewer Sly Fox!
The issue of fake/tungsten gold has now gained new urgency due to the latest surge in metal prices. But not because we are drowning in fake bars and coins, but because new owners of precious metals may get this impression after watching the video, an excerpt from which we will now see.
And, unfortunately, there are a lot of such videos on YouTube - this giant garbage dump filled with distortions, ignorance and just lies. The work of Oleg Nasobin, the former head of the cosmetics company Green Mama, combines all three of these characteristics.
Oleg Nasobin is a truly renaissance personality, collector, film actor, blogger and publicist. Find out more about it here .
This funny episode is connected with it:
In 2004, at a flea market in France, Oleg Nasobin found, in his opinion, an authentic portrait of Benvenuto Cellini. However, all the businessman’s attempts to prove its authenticity were unsuccessful; the reputable professional community did not pay any attention to this find.
Today Nasobin maintains a video blog dedicated to exposing the world financial backstage from an occult perspective - see here . His so-called lectures on the origins of Christianity are simply shocking in their ignorance.
And a small excerpt from his video about gold - see in full here .
Now about the fake gold bars, which allegedly almost replaced the real metal. We have already raised this problem many times on the pages of Goldenfront.ru, under the tag “fake bars/coins” we already have 44 materials examining the situation from all possible angles - see here . And in the sixth issue of Gold Delusions, entitled “Fort Knox Tungsten Gold – Russian Experts Are on the Trail” - see here we also talked about this.
I will not repeat everything that was said earlier and will be brief - counterfeit investment bars and coins that at least somewhat resemble the originals are a huge rarity. But in numismatics there are a lot of fakes, simply because the price per gram in numismatic coins is often hundreds of times higher than the market price. Nasobin creates even more confusion when he talks about the insecurity of exchange contracts with physical metal, which is true. But this does not mean that the bars in London vaults are fake.
I will give you one of the most recent examples of counterfeit bars that I discovered on the Internet on the Czech site Vinegret.cz - see in full here . Please note that this is five years old material.
As you can see, the work is quite clumsy.
In general, talk about the dangers of counterfeit coins and bars is very popular, oddly enough, among precious metals dealers. In this way, they are trying to scare away potential customers from purchasing at online auctions. But there is very little material available to fan such fears.
Let's not be paranoid and take an example from the man who sawed the Golden Lunar to check its authenticity. On Goldenfront.ru see here .
We also thank Sly Fox for the tip!
And to put an end to the discussion about Nasobin, we add that foreign gold in the care of the United States is stored not in Fort Knox, but in the basements of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan - see about this on Goldenfront.ru here . But for such a large-scale expert, all these are trifles.
And at the end of our video, we will include fresh footage of the spotted gold St. George the Victorious minted by the St. Petersburg Court in 2020.
Thanks to our regular reader Hermit for these shots!
So we never learned how to mint coins, which is sad. We have already made a video on this issue - see here . For beginners, let me remind you that these stains are a manufacturing defect and are not a fake. Don't sell your spotted Victorious at a discount. They are as golden as the Victorious without blemishes.
The agony of choice
Fashion for jewelry comes and goes, but silver and gold have been the main materials for the production of jewelry from time immemorial. Why these metals?
We have been producing jewelry for several years, so we can say that any of our gold or silver Solomon’s Rings have a soul: they protect their owner and help him. Like any piece of jewelry, it has a special energy and can become a family heirloom, as a valuable and kind thing that preserves the memory and good wishes of its owner.
Once upon a time three thousand years ago, King Solomon himself wore gold and silver jewelry, and in the modern world these metals are considered special. But with tungsten it is not clear - will it remain a popular material or will it be replaced by a new modern alloy in a couple of years?
Time will show. But gold and silver will wait, why should they rush - after all, eternity has no power over them... Genuine jewelry is above fashion.
In the world
It's one thing to counterfeit either hundred or twenty dollar bills.
The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and affects only the lives of hundreds of people, and is calculated in thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify banks to liquidate these fraudulent accounts, and in retail, on-site procedures (such as using special pens to check paper) are enough to stop the spread. fakes. What about gold? It is the most sacred of all commodities as it is considered the most reliable, reliable and valuable store of wealth.
The recent discovery was hidden from the mainstream media, but was distributed among the “big money” - brokers and financial authorities, and only now it was opened to public access. It concerns the gold at Fort Knox - the US Treasury gold - that guarantee of our national wealth. In other words, millions (indicated by “M”) of gold bullion are counterfeit!
The background...
In October 2009, China received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is used in regular exchanges between countries in order to pay off debts and thus pay off trade balances. In most cases, gold is exchanged and stored in safes under the supervision of a special organization based in London, which controls the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). When confirmation of shipment was received, the Chinese government requested that special tests be carried out to ensure the purity and weight of the gold bars. During these tests, four small holes are drilled into gold bars and the samples removed are then analyzed.
Officials were shocked to learn that the bullion turned out to be counterfeit. They contained tungsten inside only with an outer coating of real gold. Moreover, these gold bars, containing tracking serial numbers, originated in the United States and were stored at Fort Knox for a number of years. There have been reports of 5,600 to 5,700 400 Oz bars in supply. every!
At first, many experts said that the fake gold was in China, which has the world's best fake gold producers. The Chinese quickly conducted an investigation and published a statement in which they showed that the United States was directly involved in the scheme for the appearance of these fakes.
What Chinese investigators found: About 15 years ago - during the Clinton administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] - approximately 1.3 to 1.5 million four hundred ounce bars were allegedly manufactured from tungsten for one oil refinery company in the USA [total weight of more than 16 thousand tons]. Subsequently, 640,000 of them were tungsten plated with gold, and they were transported to Fort Knox where they remain to this day.
According to Chinese investigators, the transaction amounted to between 1.3 million and 1.5 million 400-ounce gold-plated tungsten bars that were allegedly “sold” on the international market. Clearly, the global market is literally “filled with 400-ounce counterfeit bars.” The scale of this scam could be estimated at $600 billion.
An obscure news item published in the New York Post [Jennifer Anderson] Jan. may finally make sense. 04, and started back in 2004.
DA investigating NYMEX executive ,Manhattan, New York, –Feb. 2, 2004.
Top executives at the New York Mercantile Exchange are currently under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney. People with knowledge of the matter say the investigation is underway into Stuart Smith, senior vice president of stock trading, whose office was searched on a warrant from the district attorney last week. Details of the investigation were not disclosed, but a NYMEX spokesman said it had nothing to do with any of the exchange's markets. She declined to comment further other than to say no charges had been filed. A spokesman for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office also declined to comment."
The Office of the Senior Vice President of Operations - NYMEX is where it is possible to find records [serial number and mill of origin] for every Gold Bar before it physically lands on the exchange. They must keep these records. These accurate reports must reflect the path of all physical gold that is released into the market and therefore "confirm" that the amount of gold in question could not possibly have been obtained from domestic supply in the US - because the numbers, indicated in the documents were undoubtedly significantly larger than the domestic production of US factories.
Nobody knows what happened to Stuart Smith afterwards. After his offices were raided, he took "administrative leave" from NYMEX and was never heard from again. Surprisingly, the continuation of this story never made it to the media, and the ZERO DA Morgenthau's office that conducted the search did not return to this story in the future.
Is it possible to believe that after the NYMEX branch was searched and the senior vice president took a leave of absence, the investigation yielded no results?
Another very unusual story, which also happened in 2004, can also shed light on the appearance of counterfeit gold bars:
LONDON, April 14, 2004 (Reuters) - NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd, the London-based unit of Rothschild Investment Bank [ROT.UL], is withdrawing from commodities trading, including gold, in London as it restructures its operations, a firm spokesman said in a statement. Wednesday.
Interestingly, Bill Murphy of GATA speculated back in 2004: “Why did Rothschild decide to stay in the gold business? What do I and my colleagues think about this today? I just think, in my opinion, that something is wrong. They know there's a big scandal going on and they don't want to be involved in it... [The] Rothschild wants out before the proverbial “S” hits the fan.” —BILL MURPHY, LEMETROPOLE, 4-18-2004
What is GATA?
The Gold Antitrust Authority (GATA) is an organization that has been a thorn in the heels of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve for several years now. The core of GATA's allegations is that these institutions, in coordination with other complicit central banks and large gold trading investment banks in the US, manipulated gold prices for decades.
What is GLD?
GLD is short for Good London Delivery. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) sets the standards and procedures for the supply of "gold goods" in the market. Each bar must pass the LBMA examination and meet the requirements - must have a purity of 995.0 to 999.9 per 1000. The bars must have a certain weight, shape, appearance and markings and be designated as follows:
Weight: minimum content of 350 ounces of AS (fine gold); maximum content of 430 ounces AC, the gross weight of the bar expressed in troy ounces, multiples of 0.025, rounded to the nearest 0.025 troy ounce value.
Dimensions: recommended dimensions of a quality bar when delivering gold: top surface: 255 x 81 mm; bottom surface: 236 x 57 mm, Height: 37 mm.
Purity: Minimum 995.0 parts per thousand pure gold.
Stamps: serial number; hallmark of the assay office; sample (up to four significant figures); year of manufacture (in terms of four digits).
Why use tungsten? If you are going to print counterfeit money, you need to have a special document, otherwise the bills will not look like real ones and can be easily detected with a special pen, which is what most merchants and banks use. Likewise, if you are going to make fake gold bars, you need to be sure that they will have the same weight and properties as real gold bars.
At the beginning of 2008, it turned out that millions of dollars worth of gold in the Ethiopian Central Bank turned out to be counterfeit. Instead of ingots of pure gold, only ingots of gold-plated steel were stored. They tried to sell them to South Africa, but they were sent back when the South Africans noticed this small problem. The problem with making quality fake gold bars is that gold is extremely dense. Its density is almost twice that of lead, and two and a half times that of steel. In ordinary life this is not noticeable because small gold rings and the like do not have enough weight to make it obvious, but if you take a large bar of gold, it becomes quite obvious: this thing is very, very heavy.
A standard bar of gold for interbank trading, known as a London good delivery bar, weighs 400 troy ounces (more than thirty-three pounds) but is no larger than a paperback novel. A bar of steel of the same size would weigh only thirteen and a half pounds.
According to gold expert Theo Gray, the problem is that there are very few metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions the entire cost of making counterfeits from them would be as much or more than that. from real gold.
The first exception concerns depleted uranium, which is cheap and available if you are in government, but difficult to obtain for individuals. In addition, it is radioactive, which also reduces its attractiveness.
The second exception is the real placeholder:
Tungsten. Tungsten is significantly cheaper than gold (its price can reach $30 dollars per pound compared to $12,000 pounds for gold right now). And it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it has an irregular color and is much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is very soft, you can scratch it with your fingernail.)
A fake gold bar must match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical and other properties of gold almost completely. To achieve this, a tungsten core can be made 1/8-inch smaller in every dimension than a gold bar. Then the missing dimensions are filled with real gold and the result is an ingot that, when subjected to non-destructive analysis methods, will be practically indistinguishable from a real gold ingot.
These high quality counterfeits will cost around $50,000 to produce, but will still provide a good profit considering the actual cost will be around $400,000. https://4bz.ru/content/view/443/1/
