Despite the fact they have been around over 45 years, they told me on their last "melt" meaning a bunch of scrap they sent off, they took a bath of about $14,000. I normally deal with ARA out of Dallas, but they are still not buying silver and I didn't have much money in these pieces for a quick flip. I smashed all my scrap silver with a press as I've been storing it in a pail. The only silver piece I brought them was stamped Sterling 950, a small bowl. But they were not even interested in it because their XRF kept coming back 95-98 percent and said it was "jumping all over the place" and "may be silver plate". I told them since it was obviously smashed anyway, there were more than welcome to acid test it, heck even grind a small spot and hit that with the XRF. They didn't even have acid testing solutions... They still did not want it... They placed absolute faith in their XRF, which they've had for probably 10 years, but as we all know, XRF cannot penetrate thick gold filled, which may be part of why they took a $14k loss on their last melt batch. I also noticed one of the workers using another XRF gun and holding pieces in their fingers, which seemed highly unsafe.   submitted by   /u/ToshPointNo [link]   [comments]