How to make fake gold bars
Now that the economy is collapsing, investors are becoming more interested in gold. Here's an item from PopSci that says it wouldn't be too difficult to make convincing fake gold bars out of gold-plated tungsten (which costs $30 a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold).
start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don't know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16" layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You'd pretty much have to drill it to find out it's fake.Link (Via Museum of Hoaxes)
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and it doubles as an analogy for beautiful people.
Oh, I thought this was gonna be some modern-day alchemy. I am so disappointed.
Would it displace the same amount of water as a real gold bar? Remember Archimedies and his "Eureka" moment.
Nanuq- yes,it would. It's the same density.
Mark- nice one! Fake gold, just in time for St. Patrick's Day! And this stuff won't vanish the next morning.
Nanuq, I think you have a winner! from the great Wikipedia, Gold has a density of 19.3 g·cm−3 and tungsten has a density of 19.25 g·cm−3. the bar would be lighter enough to be detected easily by the Archimedes test. They also have pretty different thermal expansion coefficents, you might be able to force the gold to de-laminate from the tungsten interior by dropping it in liquid nitrogen
Not to mention that a very small fake gold bar(2 inches x 1 inch x 1 inch) would cost ~$4000US to make. Buy I guess if you have $4000 lying around...
Isn't investing in gold jumping the gun a bit?
hasn't failed yet in several thousand years
Enochrewt, the idea isn't to make SMALL gold bars, it's to make counterfeit bars the same size and weight as standard London good delivery bars, which is what financial institutions use in trade. Grey addresses the cost issue in the article:
"Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about $50,000 to produce because it's got a lot of real gold in it, but you'd still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth closer to $400,000. A lower budget version could be made by using the same under-sized tungsten slug but casting lead-antimony alloy around it (to match the hardness, sound, and feel of gold), then electroplating on a heavy coating of gold. Such a bar would still feel and sound right and be only very slightly underweight, while costing less than $500 to produce in quantity."
As for the density, all you would need to do is dope the tungsten with a small amount of something denser (iridium and osmium are around 22.65 g/cm^3 and cost less than half what gold does) to get the density correct.
However, the big giveaway would be electrical conductivity. Gold has a conductivity of 4.52e5/ohm*cm, while tungsten is only 1.89e5/ohm*cm. You'd need a heck of a lot of current to measure a resistance that small, but the difference is quite significant.
#7...
Seems to me that the horses already left the gate.
Buy low, sell high. Right now? Record high. Wait until the current downward economic cycle ends, and buy when it's back down at $300/oz. Then you can play the chumps next time the price hits $1k. Everybody likes to predict the collapse of western civilization when there's a recession, 'cause they can't remember back a few years to the last one. Things will come around, and the price of gold will tank again. Happens every time.
I just want to add to my previous comment that 98.5% tungsten mixed with 1.5% osmium, iridium, or osmiridium would have the exact density of gold.
Gold is $1000/oz (i.e. $16,000/lb) - a news making milestone from last week. Did the author write this in October 2007, make a typo, or is he using a different pound than the rest of us?
Which economy is collapsing? Maybe it's time to learn how to make fake euros.
#13 - Gold is sold in troy units. There are 12 Troy Ounces to the Troy Pound
"it would weigh *exactly* the right amount"
sure, if you measured out a pound of tungsten...
so, would lead, if u measured out a pound of lead.
but the density of 1 pound of tungsten, of course,
would be different, and it would fail the water
displacement test, as mentioned above (archimedes)
er, i didnt read the above comments closely
enough about fixing the density problem.
apologies and sign me up if theres a
Fake Gold Home Kit to be released.
The specific gravity will give it away. This was discovered by Archimedes around 400 B.C. I think. Thats the origin of the expression Eureka! (I found it!).
Airship, Yeah, I guess my comment was colored by my preconception that fake = cheap. I assumed that everyone thought like me (and I only read the BB post, not the link, stupid work filter). And mostly it was a puzzle to see how much of a fake gold bar one troy ounce of gold would cover at 1/16th of an inch thickness (and how much it would cost) to pass the time on lunch.
My grandmother liked to pan for gold, all this has really put into perspective how much that jar full of gold flake sitting on her kitchen ledge was really worth.
Such a solution would fool a human, but it wouldn't fool a scale. An ingot that would normally weigh 12.5 kg would weigh 12.33 kg, which is almost 200 grams difference. That's quite significant, but a human would almost certainly not feel the difference, so it does pass the "pick-up test".
But, as Zen points out, this is easily fixed by adding a little bit of some heavier element.
Correction: 12.34 kg
@7 & 11
Ivan265 has basically the right idea; the horse left the barn back in 2005 or so at least, when the first round of "gold prices rose dramatically" -- because markets were reacting to the first major round of inflation from funding the Iraq war starting in 2003. However, "economists" on TV never ever like to say inflation, so they make up a bunch of bullshit about why gold prices might be up -- like adding epicircles upon epicircles to explain the motion of Mars within a geocentric model, when the reality is closer to a heliocentric model. Even now you can watch these "economists" on TV bullshit about how it was just isolated to "sub-prime mortgages"... until it obviously wasn't. Now you'll hear them saying all manner of "don't panic!" like flight attendants on an airplane that's crashing into the ocean.Also, neither TV economists nor politicians want to actually say that destabilizing the currency with inflation to pay for the Iraq war without a war tax is the primary cause of the economic crisis in the USA. (Instead Hillary blames NAFTA and suggests protectionism to get votes from the biobots in Ohio.)
But the point I really wanted to make, in response to Ivan256, is that the value of gold is relatively stable. Demand is relatively flat compared to its supply, and the supply is relatively fixed. So the price of gold is a really useful indicator of the real rate of inflation; as opposed to CPI whose basket is manipulated by politicians so that inflation appears to never rise above 3-4%. (Remember talk of "core core inflation" to fudge the numbers? Also, remember how the Federal Reserve conveniently chose to stop publishing M3 data -- where inflation is also revealed -- a few years ago?) So, again, the point I'm trying to arrive at is that the price of gold won't necessarily reach some "equilibrium" at $300 as Ivan256 suggests, because really the price of gold is the inverse of monetary policy... and governments can inflate their fiat currencies ad infinitum. There's no upper-bound to the price of gold in dollars because there's no limit to how much a fiat currency can be inflated. So, this brings me to the conclusion that we must remember Warren Buffett's basic strategy of value investing which he picked up from Benjamin Graham. "Buy low, sell high." is misleading; the pertinent information is whether gold, even at $1000/oz is still undervalued. If you believe it is (i.e. if you believe that the U.S. Dollar has much much further to tank) then buy gold, even at this price!
And I'll tell you, when gold hit $500/oz a few years ago, people thought I was crazy for calling it a Buy, because they weren't considering how very very bad this inflation problem will really be once it fully unwinds. And the USA hasn't even ended the Iraq war and ceased funding it yet! Even without any Hawley-Smoot type protectionism from the "old politics" Democratic party establishment (i.e. Hillary), it will be years of sacrifice before the ship can right itself again. With more "stimulus packages", tariffs, and quotas, and a drawn out withdrawal from Iraq, it could be over a decade!
While I'm sure the crony capitalists suckling at the teat of the Neo-Con war-machine have already converted their assets to non-dollar holdings before the information trickles through the market to unwind.
Make no mistake, the sky is not falling, but we are fucked.
So, for a bar that's 1 inch by 1 inch by 2 inches, gold weighs 632.54 grams and tungsten weighs 630.90 grams - a difference of 1.5 grams.
For someone who is "fencing their looted Nazi Gold" on the black market to a mid-level idiot thug who has never heard of Archimedes and who is guesstimating volume, 1.5 grams is too small to distinguish. Hell, even if the thug /does/ drop the bar in to a tank to check volume and then calculates weight, that tells him the gold is %99.94 pure.
The standard for 24-karat is %99.90 pure.
Idiot thug is going to knife-nick the gold, bite the gold, weigh the gold and never notice the tungsten until he melts it down.
#10: You'd need a heck of a lot of current to reach gold's current-carrying capability to force some electricity through the tungsten; Losses at /that/ level of current could be ascribed to impurities or within the error bar of the equipment, unless your equipment was really good and you had a really well-characterised connection to the gold bar.
Erm, Archimedes only works for buoyant objects. Gold bars aren't bouyant. The bar, fully immersed, will displace an amount of water equal to its volume, whether it's made of gold, lead, titanium, cast iron, what have you. If you get the ratios of heavier and lighter elements right, Archimedes won't tell you a thing about whether it's real or not.
Gold is a stupid investment. If the dollar is tanking, buy one of the currencies that it's tanking against. The only thing that has value is value.
Gold bars aren't bouyant.
Eureka, Finarf. I can't believe that we got through two dozen posts before somebody noticed that.
what if I beat the gold bar into the shape of a boat hull?
Well, since age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety, I see no reason that your poop shouldn't be beaten gold.
#24, #23:
Archimedes' technique finds volume.
THEN YOU WEIGH IT ON A SCALE.
And /then/ you do some simple math and get density.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Discoveries_and_inventions
Don't Hold Strong Opinions About Things You Don't Understand.
this is stupid, first we have to put a scale to weigh the bar on a conveyor belt....
I thought this post would be something like an instructable to make gold bars for say like a movie or something ie wouldn't pass anything but a casual glance test... not actually trying to make something to pass REAL muster. Damn now I kind of want to make a tungsten version!
The risk of buying, say, euros instead of gold with your dollars, is that as the euro is also a fiat currency (although the ECB inherited Germany's post-Weimar fear of inflation), trade between Europe and the USA creates the risk of pressure being put on the EU to debase its currency as well in order to appease exporters (to the detriment of importers). This is what China has done with its yuan pegged to dollar in order to export to the USA. Gold, absent of particle accelerators, cannot be fabricated, so it is impossible to inflate (excluding the fraud/hoax described in the original article), and so it retains its value relative to fiat currencies really well.
However, I can imagine investing in businesses and commodities that are denominated in non-dollars in an attempt of marginal return on investment above static value of commodities such as gold. This would be an attempt at real growth of value, instead of merely protecting existing value from dilution with the gold-for-dollars exchange.
Make no mistake, the sky is not falling, but we are fucked.
People don't get it yet. They just don't get it. They're spending on frivolities as if their home equity were still rising by 40% per year. It's getting worse because people are still doing exactly the things that got us in this mess. CNN should just start broadcasting Grapes of Wrath over and over. Maybe somebody would notice.
is radioactive gold cheaper? I understand there might be bit of that running around.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/metals14.htm
first we have to put a scale to weigh the bar on a conveyor belt
And check for inaccuracies in the special effects.
I want a gold plated tungsten paper weight. If I can't have that, just a tungsten paper weight would be cool. I've never felt the heft of a large chunk of gold so plain old tungsten would be satisfying enough.
Anyone know where you can buy a large chunk of tungsten?
swipe some penetrator rounds (anti-tank) , make sure you aren't getting DU
"Um, no. In fact, the "user story" for Archimedes was determining whether his gold crown had been diluted with silver. The question Archimedes sought to answer was how to determine the volume of an irregularly shaped object, which in addition to massing it, would reveal its density."
But the volume of this fake gold bar is not in question. What's in question is what it's made of. It would displace the same amount of water whether it was made of gold, iron, or aluminum, thus immersing it doesn't tell you anything about its composition. The fake bar is BY DEFINITION the same volume as a real one, and will displace exactly the same amount of water. Archimedes tells you nothing.
Of course you can make more gold: you mine it. There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about gold than there is anything else.
The natural regulatory mechanism to put the break on this feedback cycle would be the risk (and constraint) of loaning out real assets. But the central banking system already legally provides for fractional reserve banking, and any financial firm "too big to fail" (as they almost all are) can ostensibly rely on being bailed out by the Federal Reserve -- as Bear & Stearns has, which only exacerbates the inflation problem even more (because the Fed simply fabricated money "on the books" to give to Bear & Stearns, through CitiBank IIRC). So for these government sanctioned bankers, there's virtually no risk of failure; that "pollution" is all externalized to ordinary people.
Unfortunately, holders of debt are the ones who are obliterated when the eventually necessary market correction of deflation occurs -- which is how farmers got wiped out in the early 1980s when Volcker needed to put an end to stagflation. This time around it's not just farmers and shaky companies, but most people loaded with mortgages and credit card debt. So the disaster we're looking at will be alot closer to when the Federal Reserve's inflationary policy of the 1920s created the Great Depression -- when people and their banks were buying on margin in the stock market bubble.
And the most deeply entrenched government-business partnership of them all, the central bankers (i.e. "Wall Street"), will appeal to government protections and pass the true costs onto everyone else. When people talk about the "two Americas", I don't think it's valid to draw the line between "blue collar" and "white collar" as John Edwards did, but instead we need to look at "Wall Street" who suck on the firehose of fiat money creation for "investing", and everyone else who has to earn a paycheck and save money. The "investors" are actually transferring wealth from "savers" via this government monetary policy of inflation, and then they spend it willy-nilly because it's really "free money" to them. But it's everyone else who pays, in the end.
so MUCH good news;
http://www.deepjournal.com/
BBC are carrying a story about fake gold bars being found in the vaults of the Ethiopian National Bank...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7294665.stm
@42
Sounds like a double-twist straight out of Heist; those smugglers were "caught" while the real thieves made off with the real gold. This way the government would stop looking for the gold because they thought they'd already recovered it. Joke's on them!Archimedes tells me that FNARF is an ID10T.
TRR,
Unnecessary rudeness.
Noted.
What about a whipped gold bar? It works good for those 3 Musketeers bars.
Specific Heat Capacity might be able to distinguish the tungsten-based bar from the real thing; difference is about 4%.
A comment to the original article pointed out that tungsten is rather difficult to work with, so making a bar approximating a gold ingot would not be trivial.
Next time I take payment in gold bars, I'll cut a few random ones in half.
What do I get from the Canadian Tire store to bisect gold bars with?