Priced by the Pound: silver pawn Toronto

Because the arithmetic per piece is not worth the hour it would take. A sterling teaspoon holds a few dollars of metal. Itemising a 140 piece canteen would occupy an afternoon and land within a rounding error of simply weighing the tray. Pieces are therefore sorted into groups sharing one standard, weighed as a group on a floor scale, and quoted as a single figure per group. Two things get pulled out before the scale reading counts: anything weighted, and anything that turns out not to be silver at all. You see both piles. The exception to group weighing is a signed piece by a recognised maker, which gets set aside and considered on its own merits rather than disappearing into a bulk total.

Sterling is 92.5 percent silver, marked .925 or sterling, and British pieces carry a lion passant alongside a city mark: an anchor for Birmingham, a crown for older Sheffield work. Coin silver runs around 90 percent and appears on nineteenth century American flatware, often stamped only with a maker's name or the word coin. Continental European silver is frequently lower, at .800 or .835, and German pieces often show a crescent moon and crown with the numeral. Scandinavian work uses its own conventions again. None of this is decoration: a drawer holding two hundred grams of .925 and two hundred grams of .800 contains meaningfully different amounts of silver. Sterling silver lending quotes each standard separately for that reason. Where a stamp is worn away or absent entirely, a quick test settles it, and unmarked does not mean unaccepted.

Weighted pieces are a thin silver shell wrapped around filler. Candlesticks are packed with pitch or plaster to stop them toppling, and the base often has a steel disc inside. Knife handles are hollow silver cemented onto a stainless blade. A pair of candlesticks reading eight hundred grams on the scale might hold under a hundred and fifty grams of actual silver, and the underside is usually stamped weighted or reinforced to say so. Trade practice varies here, and some counters quote the gross figure, then discount heavily at the back end without explaining why. We separate weighted items into their own group and quote them at their shell weight, openly. It produces a lower headline number and a figure you can actually verify, which is the trade we prefer to make.

Two reasons, and both are about the lender's exposure rather than any judgement about your metal. The first is volatility. Silver is a smaller market than gold and roughly half its demand is industrial, in solar panels, electrical contacts, and brazing alloys, so it reacts to manufacturing cycles as well as to investment mood. Double digit moves inside a quarter are unremarkable. A lender holding your lot for ninety days is exposed to that swing, and a lower advance is the buffer. The second reason is purely physical. Ten thousand dollars of gold fits in a shirt pocket. Ten thousand dollars of silver is a crate that two people should lift, and it consumes vault shelving, insurance capacity, and handling time in proportion to its bulk rather than its value. Both costs land inside the percentage.

Sets stay in their own case and the case stays whole. A canteen is inventoried at intake, the count sheet goes into the lid, and the chest is shelved under your ticket number rather than emptied into a bin. Hollowware travels in wrapped crates with the same tag. Nothing is polished while it is here, which people occasionally find surprising: polish removes a microscopic layer of silver every time and destroys the patina on antique work, so pieces come back exactly as tarnished as they arrived. Larger lots occupy dedicated shelving rather than a safe deposit drawer, and the insured value follows the appraisal written at intake. If your lot is genuinely large, a hundred kilos or more, call ahead so the space and the second set of hands are ready when you arrive.

By content, never by face value or by count. Canadian dimes, quarters, and half dollars dated 1920 through 1966 are 80 percent silver, with 1967 and 1968 issues split between 80 percent and 50 percent depending on the strike. American coins dated 1964 and earlier run 90 percent. A mixed bag therefore has to be sorted by country and date band before it means anything, and worn coins weigh slightly less than fresh ones, which matters across a large bag. Once sorted, the bag converts into a silver weight and the band from the table above applies. Bullion rounds and Maple Leafs are simpler, since each is a known .999 ounce. Sorting a large mixed bag takes time, so leave yourself an extra half hour if you are bringing several thousand coins.