How Much Gold is in a Gold Watch?
Like in this Yacht-Master 2, reference number 116688, the BIGGEST gold watch made by Rolex,
which it's going for around 40,000 dollars right now in the market.
On this series, we take a look at gold watches from different brands and determine their
value in real gold.
But before we start our little experiment, it's time for you to guess...what portion
of the Yacht-Master 2's price do you think comes from the actual gold it contains?...Take
a wild guess...
Would you say 40, maybe 50 percent?
Hold that thought for a minute and come back at the end of the video to let me know how
close you really were!
To see how much gold our Rolex watch actually contains, we first need to take the watch
apart.
For that, we turn to our preferred watchmaker, Yuri Lopez from Chrono Sky!
Here we've labeled all the parts made out of gold.
Even though the bezel of the watch is also made out of gold, it contains a blue ceramic
insert patented by Rolex called "Cerachrom," which adds about 2 grams of extra weight to
the watch.
We'll take this into account later.
Another important point to make here is that modern gold watches are not made out of pure
or 24-karat gold.
They're actually made out of 18-karat gold, as shown on our Niton XRF precious metals
analyzer.
18K gold is approximately 75% gold by weight.
OK, let's go ahead and weigh all the parts.
208.1 grams of 18K gold minus the 2 grams for the ceramic bezel gives us a total of
206.1 grams.
But we're not finished yet!
It turns out that the bracelet of a new yellow gold Yacht-Master II comes with 11 links,
but this one right here only had 10 when we got it, so to make our calculation more accurate,
we have to add the weight of one extra link to our previous number.
Around 4.5 grams.
When we add this to our previous total, we come up with 210.6 grams of 18 karat gold.
Multiply this by 0.75 and we get a total of around 158 grams of pure gold.
We multiply this by $58.24, the price of gold when we recorded our video, and come up with
$9,200.
This is around 23% of the actual pre-owned price for the watch.
Even though there are a lot of factors that determine the price of a luxury gold watch
like this one and not just the cost of the raw materials, do you think that 23% sounds
too low, too high, or just about right?
Also, how close was your initial guess?
Let us know in a comment below.
We'll be running our little experiment on many other models on future videos, so make
sure to subscribe!
Thanks for watching!