Why are silver knives worth less than forks and spoons?

A knife is three things, and only one of them is silver

Pick up a sterling fork and it is sterling from tip to tail. Pick up a sterling table knife and you are holding three different materials. The blade is stainless steel: silver is far too soft to hold an edge, so it has almost never been used for blades. The handle is a thin shell of silver, often less than a millimetre thick, pressed from sheet and soldered together. And because a hollow shell would feel cheap and light, the handle is filled with pitch, resin or a cement compound to give it heft. The trade calls these handles loaded, filled or weighted.

The result is a knife that is heavy, hallmarked and looks every bit as good as the rest of the set, but where only the outer skin of the handle is silver. On a typical table knife weighing 70 to 90 grams, the silver shell is somewhere between 20 and 40 grams. The rest is steel and filler.

Why we pay half the rate on knives

Scrap silver is bought by weight against the live silver price, so the question is always how many grams of silver are really there. For a spoon the answer is simply what the scale says. For a knife it is not, and there is no way to weigh the shell on its own without destroying the knife.

So we do the simple, transparent thing. Knives are weighed whole, blades and all, and priced at half our normal rate for the grade of silver on the handle. A sterling-handled knife pays half the sterling rate. A continental knife with an 800 handle pays half the other-silver rate. Both figures are on the live price board as their own lines, so you can see exactly what you will get before you send anything.

Half is a generous working figure. On many knives the silver is nearer a third of the weight, so the rate is set to keep the pricing clear and predictable rather than to squeeze the last gram out of every handle.

How to weigh a canteen properly

Sort the set into two piles before you weigh it. Forks, spoons, ladles, serving pieces and anything else that is solid go in one pile and are priced at the full rate for their grade. Knives go in a second pile and are priced at the knife rate. Weigh each pile separately and enter them as separate lines in the calculator on the prices page. A typical twelve-place canteen has around a kilo of knives, so keeping them apart makes a real difference to the accuracy of your estimate.

As a rough guide when you have no scale to hand: a table knife is usually 70 to 90 grams, a dessert or side knife 45 to 60 grams, and a butter knife 25 to 40 grams. Twelve table knives and twelve side knives together come to roughly one and a half kilos on the scale.

Check the blade as well as the handle

The hallmark on a knife is on the handle, usually near the ferrule where the handle meets the blade. That mark tells you about the handle only. Look at the blade separately. Most carry a maker's name and the words stainless, Sheffield or firth stainless, which confirms steel. Occasionally you will find a blade that is itself hallmarked silver, most often on butter knives, fish knives, fruit knives and fish servers, where no edge is needed. Those pieces are solid silver and pay the full rate, so set them aside with the forks and spoons.

The reverse is also worth checking. Plenty of cutlery has steel blades with plated handles marked EPNS, A1 or simply nothing at all. Those handles contain no meaningful silver and we will tell you so rather than make a token offer. If you are not sure what you have, our guide to sterling versus silver plate covers the marks to look for.

Please do not take them apart

It is tempting to pull the blades and dig out the filling to get the knives priced as plain silver. Please do not. The filler is bonded to the shell and rarely comes out cleanly, the shell is thin enough to split, and a handle full of scraped pitch is harder to test and refine than a whole knife. It also gains you nothing, because the knife rate already accounts for the blade and the filling. Send them as they are.

Other pieces priced the same way

Knives are the most common weighted item but not the only one. Candlesticks, some trophy cups, dressing table pieces and anything with a marble, wood or glass base often have a silver skin over a filled or base metal core. We test these individually by XRF and price them on their actual silver content rather than a fixed share, and we explain the figure when we make the offer. If a piece in your collection feels heavier than it looks, mention it when you describe the lot on the sell page and we will tell you how it will be treated before you post it.