Germany wants its gold back.

[Blakenzy]

As history has shown, when Germany has financial problems, France gets nervous.....

France is too busy playing 'blitzkrieg lite' in some poor African country to notice...

[Viking]

Thread necromancy:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/tungsten-filled-10-oz-gold-bar-found-middle-manhattans-jewelry-district
Makes you wonder.

Link to newer thread with some additional speculation and discussion: http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/index.php?topic=42759.0

[Scout26]

Thread necromancy:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/tungsten-filled-10-oz-gold-bar-found-middle-manhattans-jewelry-district
Makes you wonder.

Link to newer thread with some additional speculation and discussion: http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/index.php?topic=42759.0

The zero hedge story is from 2012.  Which might go to explain why Germany wanted its gold back.

[Viking]

The zero hedge story is from 2012.  Which might go to explain why Germany wanted its gold back.

I know, I just noticed it had not been posted to this thread.

[MechAg94]

So aside from drilling your coins, is there any easy way to figure if they are gold or not?  I was thinking I heard of people bouncing the coins and listening, but that was from a book (maybe Job: A Comedy of Justice - Heinlein).

[KD5NRH]

So aside from drilling your coins, is there any easy way to figure if they are gold or not?  I was thinking I heard of people bouncing the coins and listening, but that was from a book (maybe Job: A Comedy of Justice - Heinlein).

Bending would seem like a good way to detect a thin shell of gold over a block of tungsten in the small 1-10oz bars like Viking's article.  I could even see it becoming a standard enough procedure to not devalue the bar significantly.  The pictured bar in a curve with an 18" or larger radius would have shown itself pretty quickly to not be a homogeneous bar of soft gold, while still being relatively stackable and retaining its markings without too much scuffing. 
Recasting seems like the best way to handle the standard 400oz ones, since anyone who didn't get too greedy could easily put 15-20% tungsten in there, walk away with $100k+ worth of gold per ingot and still have a pretty solid expectation that your drill bit would only hit gold.  Really, using something like tungsten birdshot would allow the smaller bars to be bent without the obvious breaking of a solid core.

Of course, the Chinese produce 80% of the world's tungsten supply, and have a reputation for tainted products already...

[birdman]

So aside from drilling your coins, is there any easy way to figure if they are gold or not?  I was thinking I heard of people bouncing the coins and listening, but that was from a book (maybe Job: A Comedy of Justice - Heinlein).

If they are eagles...weigh and measure them.  (Like the little teeter-totter thing)
A gold eagle is a gold/silver/copper alloy with a density that lies in a really weird place (substantially denser than lead, mercury, and other things, but less than the dense refractories/platinum group metals.

Meaning yes you -could- core one, but it would be really tough to create an approximate alloy with lower cost materials yet the same density.
It also wouldn't be worth it.

I like the bending idea, for bars.

There is an even easier solution.  Just hit it with a neutron source and do a gamma spectrogram.  Anything other than gold would show up like a turd in a rice bowl.

[Sergeant Bob]

So aside from drilling your coins, is there any easy way to figure if they are gold or not?  I was thinking I heard of people bouncing the coins and listening, but that was from a book (maybe Job: A Comedy of Justice - Heinlein).

Great book! Gay Deceiver, Bounce!