Huge pile of Rolex gold dust

[hunterp27]

So the recent thread regarding polishing versus refinishing made me recall an nice find for a friend.........
I have a buddy who is Rolex trained and certified who branched out on his own many years ago. With all the Rolex watches in the DFW area he decided working for himself was a better proposition than working as the watchmaker for any of the large Rolex resellers (non-AD) here. He doesn't advertise or hustle for business, it's all word of mouth and he seems to stay quite busy. We've known each other since grade school and he's really quiet and low profile kinda guy. He works from a shop at his home where he will take "drop ins" if he knows you but mostly he picks up at several of the area resellers were customers can drop off their piece.
Anyway, he will do full serving, polishing, cleaning, refinishing, fixing broken parts and so on. As you can imagine over time significant amounts of polishing dust and debris accumulates from his polishing wheel. He basically would sweep it up and put it in a box and forget about it. Additionally he'd shake out the area rug and sweep that into the box too. It sorta looked like a box of grayish brown dust. After a number of years it dawned on him to take it and have the PM sorted from the SS and other metals only to find he'd accumulated almost 11K worth of gold. Quite a nice pile of Rolex gold dust you might say.

[Hairdude1]

[silverbullet818]

Woah!

[Onikage]

[KrismanX]

Sounds like its time to buy himself a nice little finder's gift.

[Knappo 1307]

I like that story...

[superdog]

Very cool. Did he buy himself a new Rolex?

[kleungsf]

That's why jewelers and goldsmiths sweep their floors by hand. The dust and bits add up in the long run and in some cases tools are melted to recover the gold


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[Mr Daytona]

Thats just awesome.

[BBL]

I like it!

[droptopman]

Great story.

[MBYSF]

Would love to see a pic of that

[tritium8]

Awesome. Reminds me of sitting at the jewelers designing my wife's ring....small diamonds all over his desk and a few on the floor. Didn't seem to bother him.

[brandrea]

[RichM]

Good for him. It's like an Xmas bonus.

[THC]

Hmmmmm, I would need to see how much gold actually comes off during polishing for me to buy in to this... I honestly do not know though

[Lordofrolex]

wow pretty crazy

[Tri-Tip]

Sounds like he owes a lot of people a total of $11,000. Maybe $3.00 each???

[handsfull]

11k worth of gold dust? Wow. That's quite a bit. I'm starting to understand why some cases are overpolished now - LOL.

[LuminousMaximus]

That's it! I'm Never polishing a watch again

[SemperFi]

Great story! If he would have sold the gold dust just a few years ago he would have had around 15K. Still a nice haul though.

[cht]

Really?



Gold is around $1,000USD an ounce.

So he had over HALF a POUND of GOLD???
Around 300 grams of gold dust??

THat's more than the weight of a FULL gold rolex model watch!

from polishing?????

Am I missing something?

[Chaching]

great story

[locutus49]

Originally Posted by cht

Really?



Gold is around $1,000USD an ounce.

So he had over HALF a POUND of GOLD???
Around 300 grams of gold dust??

THat's more than the weight of a FULL gold rolex model watch!

from polishing?????

Am I missing something?

And Rolex gold is not pure gold. This story has a few holes in it.

[hunterp27]

Originally Posted by locutus49

And Rolex gold is not pure gold. This story has a few holes in it.

Sorry if you don't believe it. That's entirely up to you to snipe away behind a keyboard somewhere out there in the ether. No where did I state when he actually converted the pile of dust (price of gold fluctuation) nor did I state how long he accumulated the material. For the record, the price of gold was just about at an all time high and he accumulated the dust over a period of just less than 5 years.........and remember this ain't a hobby for him, it's a full time job with many many Rolex's coming through So ya, it really did happen and ya it was a rather large pile of dust. Consider the holes closed. Oh an one last thing, you are correct that a Rolex isn't 100% solid gold but it's dang close.

[KenNethcole]

This remind me of when I work at a lab where we sand blasted some gold products. There was a vacum that was sucking all the sand used for blasting. Every few months we would have to empty the vacum and send the sand out. The gold would then be separated from the sand and the owner of the company would get a big check for the gold.

[Danny83]

Cool

[BNA/LION]

Awesome!

[jrs146]

Haha wow! A good lesson as why to never polish, especially a gold watch!


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[Punishher7]

Cool story!