I guess I've just had some rather good luck when it comes to looting skips and dumpsters. Got a perfectly good lightweight fabric coat too, dry, clean and put in a bag before being tossed.
But the ivory (or whalebone, I'm not sure which) antique page-turner with the silver lettering inlaid into the blade and its big heavy silver endcap, a gold/diamond rolex watch, a load of silver coat buttons (might have overlooked them otherwise as there was no tarnish, but after finding a lot of other silver and some gold (literal, actual gold, not metaphorically speaking, although it was a goldmine of a skip all the same), I snagged the buttons too, and then tested a couple by roughening the surface with sandpaper, wetting the abraded area and then directing a jet of hydrogen sulfide gas (a test for silver, although one to be done with great care, as hydrogen sulfide is not only foul smelling, like very, very concentrated rotten eggs, but it is similarly toxic to cyanide gas, capable of a rapid kill with a single breath if it be concentrated, with cyanide antidote kits being useless in countering H2S poisoning) at the buttons, which turned a greyish-black color, indicative of the presence of silver, due to the formation of silver suilfide.
And best of all was the solid silver, hallmarked and dated, very old jerusalem cross, from, as far as I am able to tell, 900 AD. Big, heavy, chunky necklace, complete with a really nice silver braid chain. Quite a weight of silver to it, the front decorated with four crosses in the knights templar style, and the back depicting christ, the temple in jerusalem, plus a couple of other scenes of xtian iconography. I'd love to know how much it is worth. I did try taking it to jewellers shops and asking, but they just tried offering me the weight price of the silver, and would have had it melted down, so I told them they could go get stuffed, since IMO melting down antiques like that for scrap metal is near enough criminal; and certainly
pretty unpalatable and disgusting; I'm sure as shit not about to have a nice antique like that melted down for its scrap value. It would be one thing had it been made out of palladium or platinum, I'd not melt the necklace itself down even then, but the chain, I could have a good lot of palladium or platinum hydrogenation catalysts from it.
Currently, I'm waiting for the next thrown out fridge or freezer, so I can make off with the compressor, for use in building a vacuum pump. I see them fairly commonly, but could do with a few so I've a decent number of vacuum pumps
