If you had a canteen of silver cutlery with bone handles would it be possible to calculate the...

[sandyRoe]

...weight of the metal without damaging the items?
Did Archimedes find the method?

[factor-fiction]

I'd have thought you could keep them dry by putting them in a sealed box and putting the box in the water to see how much was displaced. Then repeat it without the knives.
Maybe I've mis-remembered his Principle though

[aelmpvw]

you're forgetting about the bone handles factor

[shooty]

Displacement with a calculation (that i don't know) could possibly work, but you will have an unknown factor that is embeded in the handle.

[factor-fiction]

Ah- didn't spot that he just wanted the weight of the metal part. Maybe he already knew the weight of a bone handle. I don't know

[woofgang]

Well you could hang them on bits of string and only dangle the metal into the water but if there was a silver tang protruding into the bone handle, you' d lose that bit.

[sandyRoe]

This is just a hypothetical set.
OK, I'll break a handle off and weight the blade :-)

[aelmpvw]

sandy, are you flogging them because you only won £2.60 on the euro?

[shooty]

Hypothetically, if the bone is Ivory, Cash that in instead. It will probably be worth more than the Silver.

[sandyRoe]

I flogged off nearly all the family silver, such as it was, years ago. The only thing I couldn't bear to part with was the silver spoon that I had in my mouth when I was born.

[Ellipsis]

Pretty sure it can be done. The answer lies in here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_density

Relative density is often used by geologists and mineralogists to help determine the mineral content of a rock or other sample.

In this case the "mineral" is silver and the "rock" is the canteen of cutlery.

[shooty]

Good work ellipsis. That gives me an headache trying to figure out how one starts to figure it out. I'll leave it to the boffins : /

[sandyRoe]

If you found the volume, then calculated the weight as though it was all silver, then subtracted the actual weight, would you have the weight of the handle?

[Jonathan-Joe]

In theory you could do it this way, ignoring that some of the silver is embedded in the handles.
Find the volume of the handles (by displacement) then the volume of the complete items. The difference is the volume of silver. Look up the density of silver then use the formula:- weight = density x volume.
In practice, I doubt whether you could measure the volumes accurately.

[jake-the-peg]

That won't work - the handles aren't solid, the knives have a 'tang' of metal in the handle that anchors them

You don't know how much of the handle is bone and how much is metal and you can't get that volume by displacement.

So unfortunately in this specific case that isn't possible

Well not without an x-ray machine too

[Jonathan-Joe]

Jake - read my post properly.

[Khandro]

I don't understand; are you saying that they are made of solid silver? and if they are, the spoons and forks would be uniformly silver, so if that is the case, you are only referring to knives, the blades of which must be of steel, the only knives I have ever seen with actual silver blades are small fruit knives. It would not be possible to ascertain the weight of the metal without removing the handles because you would not know the size of the tang. Bone handles are glued on (or should be) with a reversible glue which should melt in boiling water, a process better left to a professional cutler.

[Old_Geezer]

Hypothetical set eh ?

Ok I'd agree with the displacement stuff especially JJ's explanation, but you could get an impoved estimate by using jake's x-ray machine to estimate the tang volume and use that knowledge in the calculations. You're not going to get 100% accuracy, but what measuring device gives you that anyway ?

[Old_Geezer]

And yes, you can measure the weight of any item that has no bone handle directly, and add that on to your calculation for the rest.

[jake-the-peg]

Yes but you *can't* ignore that some of the silver is in the handles can you?

Not when you consider that silver is what? 6 times as dense as bone?

[Jonathan-Joe]

Jake - in my answer I implied that my method was not accurate. I doubt whether the tang weighs more than 5% of the complete blade, so that is the degree of error in ignoring it. I don't think that there is any method using domestic equipment that would produce a dead accurate answer.