| Author |
 Replies: 29 / Views: 2,991 |
|
Pillar of the Community
Canada
1700 Posts |
I know that there are bullion bars and coins for gold, silver, copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, and aluminum. What other known metals are used for bullion bars and coins?
Has anyone heard of rhodium for bullion?
|
|
|
|
Pillar of the Community
Canada
1731 Posts |
I believe there is a titanium bar and rhodium coin too.
|
|
Bedrock of the Community
United States
36745 Posts |
|
|
Pillar of the Community
614 Posts |
|
|
Moderator
 Australia
16829 Posts |
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
|
|
Valued Member
Australia
216 Posts |
Rumor has it that one someone has been using gold coated titanium bars as bullion.
Apparently China found a whole bunch of them, as you could guess. They were not happy.
|
|
Pillar of the Community
United States
1454 Posts |
Tungsten is definitively one PM you don't want in your collection.
|
|
Pillar of the Community
United States
1454 Posts |
I would love to own an electrum coin some day. The Isle of Man and Gibraltar had some commissioned in 2002 that I've tried to buy but the price tag has gotten pretty exorbitant on most of them.
|
|
Valued Member
United States
492 Posts |
OK traevin, I'll bite. Besides being great for light bulb filaments, what's wrong with tungsten?
Also, Petersun, bullion aluminum? Really? Never heard of it being used as bullion.
|
|
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Anything with a base metal I would want to call "pseudo-bullion" because their investment potential is laughable. And even though rhodium is precious, I would never buy it in bullion form. Its uses are pretty limited. It's mostly for plating silver to increase durability.
|
|
Moderator
Australia
16829 Posts |
Quote:
Rumor has it that one someone has been using gold coated titanium bars as bullion.
Apparently China found a whole bunch of them, as you could guess. They were not happy. It's tungsten that's the problem, not titanium. Titanium is almost as lightweight as aluminium and would easily be spotted by specific gravity testing. And it's China that's the source of the tungsten-faked-gold bars, since China has most of the world's tungsten supplies. Quote:
OK traevin, I'll bite. Besides being great for light bulb filaments, what's wrong with tungsten? It's density / specific gravity is almost identical to that of gold. Give a slab of tungsten a gold plating and there's no easy way to tell the difference between it and a solid gold ingot, until you try to melt it; tungsten has a much higher melting point than gold. Wikipedia. The only reason it doesn't happen more often is that, as I said, tungsten has a super-high melting point. So making that "slab of tungsten" in the first place isn't easy to do. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
|
|
Pillar of the Community
 Canada
1700 Posts |
Aluminum. Less than one dollar per pound.
|
|
Pillar of the Community
Canada
1700 Posts |
Well, many bullion metals they sell in the market, like rhodium, have high radiation. Where could one store these? You could get lukemia after a few years.
|
|
Bedrock of the Community
United States
12437 Posts |
Rhodium is an inert member of the Platinum Group mostly used in catalytic applications. Radium is a highly radioactive but rare element whose discovery earned Marie Curie a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is worth noting that Marie Curie died from the effects of radiation exposure due to her research. To this day, her notebooks(complete with lead storage boxes) are still too radioactive to handle without proper shielding precautions.
Edited by biokemist6
07/05/2012 01:22 am
|
|
Valued Member
Australia
216 Posts |
Quote:
It's tungsten that's the problem, not titanium. I knew it was one of the "T" metals. My bad  And if your right about the source of the bars in question, well all I can say is KARMA.  |
|
Pillar of the Community
United States
2189 Posts |
|
| |
Replies: 29 / Views: 2,991 |
Posted 07/04/2012 2:49 pm
