Hi all, I've been lurking for quite a while now and then decided to register not long ago. I have been collecting silver for almost twenty years now, in many various forms such as coins and rounds, bars, crystalline nuggets, industrial equipment, and photographic waste. I live in south east NSW, not far from Canberra. I have been in and out of many different jobs over the years, but have made a lot of money from gold prospecting, both with a detector and a highbanker (sluice). It was from the prospecting trips I had to WA over the years, that I came to collect silver, as each time on the return journey I would stop in a small town in the Flinders Ranges and swap a couple of gold nuggets for a couple of handfuls of silver nuggets. Luck has had a lot to do with my silver collection. Luck, and an open mind to where I am and what I'm looking at. I knew an old upholsterer who had jars of coins from the many lounges he had repaired over the years, one jar being full of round 50c pieces and old crowns. He sold the jar to me with 220 coins in it for $1 a coin. I wish I had taken more interest in the other jars of thripence, etc. At an auction looking for a lawn mower, I heard a bloke talking about a large strange looking machine (from CSIRO) with silver used inside it. I won it for $80, pulled out 8kg of silver, and a few years later in 2004 I sold 5kg of it for $1200. It did also cost me a box of beer to have the bloke at the local council tip take the rest of the machine. In about 1995 I got to talking to a bloke over a beer and found out he ran a photographic lab and that he collected the silver washed out of the films and paper he developed. I bought a few kilos off him over the years for what worked out to be $3 an ounce. I sold all of it last year, 5.5kg for $6800. No doubt I'll be kicking myself later in life for selling large amounts (or any amount), especially when the price will be up around $100 or more, but when you're broke, you're broke. I understand that some people are now looking at the silver content in old electrical equipment. For now I think I'll give it a miss, but as the silver price goes up, maybe I'll look twice then. Happy stacking, Tony.
