www.925-1000.com

the stone looks to me more likely to be chrysoprase than beryl (i.e. emerald or green - non-chromium-containing - beryl) check for comparison http://www.luxury-gadgets.com/images/chrysoprase-snuffbox.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; the stone appears to be cryptocrystalline (tinies...

here's another way to sniff out silver (be careful! it's controversial!) actually if you have a good sense of smell it will be very useful. find a piece of silver that is either sterling or plated (but well plated, not with the metal rubbed off everywhere) and that is tarnished. now rub your thumb o...

well, doos, i would have bought them, black as toby's aspidistra, tho i wouldn't have when they were tarted up to look like the nice bright shiny silver everyone wants. i have come to really like the "oil slick" iridescence one finnds in some heavily oxidied silver, the purplish blues etc....

if you write to the dunhill company they ought to be able to tell you everything there is to know about the etui and its original owner:

customer.services@dunhill.com

hello doos - these offending scales don't come off with the usual pastes. i have experimented on some cheap used silverplated items and can tell you that scraping the scale off is not workable either, which leaves boiling or heating it in something like oxalic acid or another acid, as you suggested....

viewtopic.php?t=11330&highlight=specific+gravity
will go into detail for you, you can do it at home.

yes silver sickness, the agglomerations of black somewhat sticky-seeming but unyielding goop on some silver. i have seen it on both sterling and plated items, on insides (mostly) and outsides.
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this appears to be pewter rather than silver, though one can't say that with certainty unless other evidence rules it out. it just does not look like silver.

the only thing i can think of at the moment is to call a doctor. lol. seriously, i would like some input from a metallurgist, if possible.
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outside toronto there is a large smelter. when the hunt brothers did their dirty, people went into antique shops, bought up all sorts of silver that had been priced years before, and took it there. the owner actually managed to save a number of historically important pieces. one of my friends had a ...

Pat i like the little engineer on top of the enormous boiler. trains used to be very attractive for tabletop decoration - i wish i had a photo of my grandfather's long-gone salt train. he had rigged it up on a narrow-gauge train track, there was a little silver locomotive with silver salts on wheels...

Rosebud is given as the name of the company that made this pattern, discontinued in about 1950. it will be happy hunting for someone to track down the company.
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Tom

even leaving aside stylistic considerations, the metal looks too new, too even, too "pretty" and the marks are too new-looking. everything is "too" whatever. moreover the city mark doesn't look like the old city marks that are posted on the pre-1886 page.

well I still prefer the coffee dripper. The coffee might look about the same as ink but it's a much pleasanter thing to drink.
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I'll go out on a limb here and say that this may have been an ampulla, a piece of church silver, from someone's family chapel.

What does the motto say?
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good evening and pass the coffee please . . .'tis a coffee dripper. Usually the cylinder is a bit taller for those of us who need extra blasts of caffeine.
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hi without having it in hand it is hard for me to assess the era from which it dates though i will take a guess and say 1920, give or take (mostly give) 5-8 years. also i think, from looking at the pictures, anyway, that the lobsterclaw catch is a later replacement. the pearls may be a kind of "...

you have raised an interesting point. i have seen dozens of mexican hoops etc which were brass with a faint hint of silver, yet marked as 'sterling' . in this case however, with Pineda's reputation, one should not worry about its being plated. that would leave only the possibility of fakery. the wor...

continental flatware is much more substantial than north american. perhaps it had to do initially with the relative scarcity of silver, which accounted also for the american flatware's thinness. i've wrestled with a few sets of silver that would intimidate an elephant. around here, they are an endle...

LOL i should say - in germany