How To Make Cheap Fake Gold

Gray Matter: How To Make Cheap Fake Gold:

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Instead of a 10-ounce ingot, I cast a two-kilogram (4.4-pound) fake the size of a Twinkie cake. A Twinkie heavier than four pounds? Yes, gold is dense, much denser even than lead. Good forgeries must have the right weight, and there is only one element as dense as gold that's neither radioactive nor expensive. That's tungsten, which can cost less than $50 a pound.

To fabricate a convincing fake, crooks could pour molten gold around a tungsten core. The bar would have a near-perfect weight, and drilling shallow holes would reveal nothing but real gold. A two-kilogram bar made this way would cost about $15,000 and be "worth" about $110,000. Since I have to work within PopSci's modest budget, and I'm not a criminal, I settled for a fake costing about $200 in materials.

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