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26 results for “Lost-wax casting”
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
…as granulation and repoussé remain hand skills with no full machine equivalent. · CAD and casting have displaced volume production, not the top of the trade. · Gold's chemical inertness, not just its softness, is what makes it uniquely suited to fine surface work and permanent co…
Yusuf Demir · 16 min read
Science · 9 August 2026
The Metallurgy of Karat
…ass is not gold, and that quarter is engineered. It sets hardness, colour, melting range, casting behaviour, response to polishing and resistance to tarnish. Change it and you change everything about how the metal behaves on the bench, even though the assay result stays identical…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…between markets — 400 oz in London, kilobars in Asia — so relocating metal often means re-casting it, not just flying it. · When freight and re-casting capacity are constrained, the London–New York spread widens; the dislocation is a logistics signal, not a market failure. · Sanc…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…helmingly prefer the cosmetic result, and dentists prefer materials that avoid an outside casting laboratory. What remains is concentrated among older patients with existing restorations and a few markets where a gold tooth still carries social status. · Why is e-waste recycling…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Markets · 11 September 2026
The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold
…2017 the Bundesbank moved 674 tonnes from New York and Paris to Frankfurt, melting and recasting every returned bar to check weight and fineness. The exercise was completed ahead of schedule and is the closest thing to a full external audit any large holder has conducted and des…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…ivery specifications before it could be logged into the domestic vault's records. · The recasting problem · A surprising share of the friction in any repatriation programme has nothing to do with security and everything to do with paperwork that has not kept pace with metallurgic…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…— not any single instrument. · Visual and provenance check: refiner marks, serial number, casting texture, and whether the bar has a documented custody record. Most fakes fail here, on details a specialist notices instantly. Dimensional gauging: calipers to a hundredth of a milli…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…mes blockchain-based, sometimes a simpler centralised database — to a bar at the point of casting, intended to travel with it through every subsequent sale. The technology is not the hard part; getting mine sites, transporters, refiners and end buyers all to actually use the same…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
History · 9 August 2026
The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us
…ounder's or scrap hoards: a metalworker's stock of recyclable material. Expect fragments, casting waste, ingots and mismatched pieces valued by weight rather than as objects. · Nothing in the gold decides between these. What decides is context: the soil profile, the container, wh…
Marguerite Adler · 16 min read
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
…London Good Delivery bar — the wholesale unit 100 oz COMEX deliverable bar — a different casting entirely T+2 Standard loco London spot settlement 2×/day LBMA benchmark auctions, 10:30 and 15:00 London · The demand side has four different clocks · Ask why the price moved and you…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
…be. That reading misunderstands the participant. A reserve manager buying gold is not forecasting a higher price; in most cases the institution would prefer a lower one, since it intends to keep buying for years. The flow is slow, price-insensitive and largely indifferent to the…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Mining · 5 August 2026
Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit
A gold mine is not a hole with gold in it. It is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Mo…
Amara Okonjo · 20 min read
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
A hallmark is one of the oldest consumer protection technologies in continuous use. It is also, on close inspection, a small masterpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A h…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Mining · 19 August 2026
Nine Grams a Tonne
What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…
Amara Okonjo · 18 min read
Markets · 17 August 2026
Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars
Most of the world's gold exposure is a contract, not a metal. Futures, unallocated accounts and exchange-traded funds each promise gold in a different way — and the differences only become visible whe…
Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read
History · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…
Marguerite Adler · 14 min read
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-coloured, stops being inert in the way you expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you…
Amara Okonjo · 19 min read
Mining · 22 May 2026
The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem
A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…
Amara Okonjo · 15 min read
Markets · 8 September 2026
The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do
For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…
Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
Somewhere between a mine's doré bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's mar…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
Roughly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most selle…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Markets · 18 August 2026
The Vault Beneath the City
Beneath the Bank of England and beneath lower Manhattan sit two of the largest concentrations of monetary gold on earth, moved between anonymous compartments by a handful of porters who never touch th…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewell…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Science · 10 August 2026
Where Gold Actually Comes From
Every gram of gold on Earth was manufactured in an astrophysical catastrophe, arrived here after the planet had already formed, and was then concentrated by hot water. Three separate accidents, none o…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
