Selling silver cutlery

First this: 90, 100 and 110 are not a silver fineness

This is the most common disappointment at our counter. If the back of the handle says 90, 100, 110 or 120, your cutlery is silver-plated. Those figures state how many grams of silver were used to cover a set of twelve place settings – it is a thickness of coating, not an alloy.

Plated cutlery has use value and sometimes collectors’ value, but the layer of silver is too thin to recover profitably. We therefore do not buy it as precious metal, and we would rather say so at once than after half an afternoon of waiting.

What is solid silver

The stamps sit on the back of the handle, often close to where it meets the bowl or the tines. A loupe is nearly always needed: on used cutlery they are half worn away.

• 925 / STERLING – sterling silver, 92.5% silver.
• 835 – the commonest Dutch and German alloy for cutlery.
• 833 – old Dutch silver, frequent on antique cutlery.
• 800 – a great deal of German and Italian work.
• Zwaardje or Minervakop – the Dutch sword mark and the French Minerva head, both assay marks; then look for the accompanying fineness figure.

The knives are the exception

In virtually every set – a solid silver one included – the knives are built differently: a hollow silver handle, filled up with resin or pitch, and a blade of steel. It has to be so, because silver is too soft to cut with.

We therefore weigh those knives separately and count only the silver of the handle. A knife of 80 grams often yields no more than 25 to 35 grams of silver. So do not calculate with the weight of the whole canteen.

Roughly what does a canteen fetch?

A complete six-person canteen in 835 silver often weighs between 1,500 and 2,500 grams net, the knife handles included. At a silver price of around 1.60 euro per gram of fine silver the material value then lies roughly between 2,000 and 3,300 euros.

That is the floor. With a sound, complete service by a known maker – Christofle, Keltum, Van Kempen & Begeer, Wolfers – the trade value sometimes sits above it, because it resells as a service instead of as raw material. We always make that comparison.

• Complete – a complete set is worth more than loose parts.
• Marked – a maker’s mark makes resale as a service possible.
• Undamaged – dents and loose handles depress the service value, not the silver value.
• Canteen present – the original case counts when it sells as a service.

Do not polish before the valuation

Tarnish on silver is silver sulphide: a thin, dark layer caused by sulphur in the air. For the weighing it makes no difference, and polish takes a small amount of material away with every session.

With antique cutlery there is a further reason: the dark shadow in the engraving – the patina – belongs there. Whoever polishes it away polishes away part of the collectors’ value.