Value of Your Work

 If you run a dental practice or a dental laboratory and you are Brel your scrap precious metals, you may be missing out on some serious cash.

In general, the use of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium in dental restorations has been decreasing in recent years with the advancement of technology.

However, because many restorations with metal placed over the past decades have now reached their life expectancy, they are now being removed from the patients' mouths to be replaced with new more advanced implants.

Where to start? Simply ask your patients if they are interested in keeping an old crown, bridge, or other implants containing valuable metals. if the patient declines, you can add the piece to a 'scrap pile' and, after a while, you may find yourself with a pretty valuable collection.

Determining the value of gold teeth and bridges can be very challenging because dental gold is often alloyed with many other different metals. In contrast to gold jewellery, dental gold is not marked with a hallmark showing the purity. Dental practices should inform their patients on what implants have been used, but over the years people tend to forget what they bought.

The precious alloys used to make yellow gold crowns can run on the order of 10 to 20 karats (pure gold is 24 karat).

Yellow dental gold normally consists of a high-grade alloy with the following composition:

- 50% to 90% gold

-1% to 30% silver

- 0% to 20% palladium

- 0% to 12% platinum

- Remainder: other metals mixed in

Also silver-coloured ("white" gold) crowns may have significant precious metal content. The hidden metal substructure of porcelain-fused-to-metal crowns and bridges is sometimes made from precious-metal alloy, too.