With the ever rising price of gold,  and the fact that everybody on the block is buying scrap gold,  we are thinking about getting into the game as well. We have a least a call a week from someone wanting to sell their old gold.  We have been reluctant because it seems a little like a customer relationship nightmare.  We have always had wonderful people who come to us to get something custom made.  We use new gold,  and charge for our labor and expenses.  If we sell a custom piece of jewelry for $1600.00 and then down the road the customer wants to sell it back to us for scrap,  we could only pay them the scrap value.    We would never want our wonderful customers thinking we had taken them to start with. All of our custom pieces are one of a kind, made for a specific person,  not pieces that we could have sitting in our cases tieing up our funds praying for another customer to fall in love with it enough to purchase it again.  So we would sell it the refiners,  who would melt it and refine the gold back to  pure to be used again.  As we melt gold our selves reusing old pieces to cast new pieces can lead to tired gold,  that has been recast to many time without being refined and the new piece may have porosity in it; which, can lead to a brittle ring or pendant.  I think though in this market,  we need as many revenue building avenues as we can come up with,  so it may be high time we joined the rest of the jewelry world and started to buy gold!