Orange County scrap gold buying
Sell scrap gold privately in Orange County.
The broken clasp, the single earring whose partner is long gone, the bent ring, the dental crown in a drawer, the tangle at the bottom of the jewelry box. It does not have to be pretty or whole. If it is real gold, we buy it by weight.
Request a Gold OfferYes, we buy scrap — all of it
Scrap gold simply means gold sold for its metal rather than as a wearable piece, and its condition is beside the point. Snapped chains, kinked bracelets, bent and broken rings, orphaned single earrings, pendants missing their stones, class rings you will never wear, cufflinks with no match, worn wedding bands, dental gold — crowns, bridges and inlays — and the mystery tangle nobody has sorted in years. None of it needs to be repaired, cleaned or complete. A single earring is worth exactly its gold; it does not need its partner to have value, which surprises people more than almost anything else we tell them. The same goes for a ring that has been cut off in an emergency room, a chain with a link torn out, or a bracelet flattened at the bottom of a drawer for a decade — the damage is irrelevant to the metal. If you have been putting off dealing with a small pile of broken gold because it seemed like too little to bother with, it is usually worth more than people assume once it is weighed properly.
Testing gold that is broken or unmarked
Scrap is often unmarked, rubbed smooth, or mixed with base metal, so we test rather than trust the look. A discreet acid test on a scratch of the metal reads the karat; an electronic tester confirms it; XRF is used on anything ambiguous or on dental gold, where the alloy is not standardized the way jewelry is. Dental gold is genuinely variable — it can run anywhere from low karat to quite high depending on the work and the era — which is exactly why it gets analyzed rather than guessed. Base-metal fittings, steel springs in earring backs, and any non-gold core are identified so they are not counted as gold you do not have. Magnets are a quick first screen — real gold is not magnetic, so anything that jumps to a magnet is base metal or has a base-metal core — though a magnet alone cannot confirm karat, which is why the acid and electronic tests still follow. Everything is tested openly, on the table, so you can see how each piece was assessed.
How a scrap offer is calculated
Scrap is the purest weight-and-purity case there is. We sort the lot by karat, because 10K at .417, 14K at .585, 18K at .750 and 22K at .916 cannot be weighed together. Each karat group is weighed as net gold — stones, base-metal parts and any solder deducted — in grams or pennyweight, where one pennyweight is a twentieth of a troy ounce, about 1.555 grams. That verified fineness times net weight, against the live gold market at the moment you sell, is the metal value, and the offer reflects it net of refining and handling. We hold no static per-gram price on the site because the market shifts through the day; the calculation is done live, in front of you, on a calibrated scale.
What actually determines a scrap number
Two things and little else: how much gold is genuinely there, and how pure it is. Higher karat and heavier solid pieces carry more gold; hollow links, thin plating over base metal, and gold-filled items marked GF or 1/20 carry far less than they appear to, because plating is a whisper of gold over brass. The good news is that condition, tangling, dents and missing stones change nothing about the gold — you lose nothing by selling it ugly. And there is no point cleaning scrap; a wipe of metal removed helps nobody and the lot is going to be weighed regardless.
What to bring or photograph
Do not spend an evening untangling or repairing anything — bring it as it is, in the bag or box it lives in. If you can, separate obvious costume and plated bits from pieces with real karat stamps, and photograph any stamps you can find (10K, 14K, 585, 750, 916). A rough weight on a kitchen scale gives us a starting range. Keep dental gold as-is; we test it on arrival and there is nothing to prepare.
Why a specialist beats the mall kiosk
Scrap is where casual gold-buyers cut the most corners: paying on the lowest karat in a mixed pile, weighing every piece together, or refusing dental and single earrings as too much trouble. As a private buyer we sort every karat, weigh net gold openly, test what needs testing including dental, and pay from that. There is no counter, no crowd and no rush to sign. Because scrap is priced on weight and purity alone, there is nothing subjective to argue about — the scale and the karat test do the talking, and you can watch both. We buy scrap by appointment in Orange County or by prepaid insured shipping — practical when the lot is small — and settle in cash or wire once it is tested and weighed. We are an independent private buyer, so there is no counter markup baked into what a storefront has to earn back on every gram.