Posted on 12/09/2005 10:49:04 AM PST by Travis McGee
I think there are 12 troy ounces in a troy pound, not 16
All they had to do was build their custom pallets with 5 riser webs.
It might be a set fake, but it's not a photoshop fake. The second photo with the people in it is taken from a slightly different angle, but closely matches in details that would be fiendishly difficult to fake in PS.
This isn't like, guess how many jellybeans and win a prize. I think maybe who ever was staking it, got worn out towards the end.
I was thinking that the base looked like 50k# on two 2"x40" boards --coming out to about 300 psi. No big deal for the base. For the pallet boards we got for each inch of width about 200 # distributed over a 3 ft. span --believable.
I say the picture can be for real.
What about the total load of the "gold" in the picture and its effect on the floor?
Upon request, interested investors and clients were provided tours of the gold vault. After several years of successful operation a prospective investor was examining the vault and requested A CLOSER LOOK.
He stepped forward and scratched a gold bar and his fingernail soon became coated in gold dust. This landed the bogus gold swindlers in the big house and left a crowd of many crying investors.
Yes, it is accurate, it was taken in my basement. ;)
Let's say each pallet weighs 3 tons. Six pallets high is 18 tons = 36 kips. Put that on square yard of concrete it comes out to about 30 pounds per sq.in. Structurally this is nothing. Everyone likes to go goofy over gold. Gold salesmen know this.
Span Elasticity.
Looks like the joists members are 12 inches apart and the pallet is more or less square, that makes the load area 4 square foot. We can plug in some numbers (from a hazy memory) in lieu of more information to check if this is reasonable.
1" APA rated plywood on 12" centers:
Select grade - 1200 psf - 4800 lbs.
Marine grade - 1500 psf - 6000 lbs.
Looks reasonable to me ...
Per the link ...
Total Gold in Trust:
Tonnes: 232.32
Ounces: 7,469,219
Value US$
3,851,491,895.52
IIRC, one tonne = 1000 kilograms.
Good point. But the fact is no holder of this amount of gold would ever reveal what the interior of the vault looked like, how the gold was stored, how the gold was inventoried, etc.
There's a prospectus available at the link which I cant download due to time problems (other things to do) but taking a non-engineer approach, it's most relevant to note that this is a NYSE company which is filing SEC reports.
That means an outside audit firm is certifying their financials. Auditing 101 requires the auditors to verify the inventory. If the auditors are sane they would count every single bar, weigh several picked at random and send several random bars to a professional gold assessor before signing off on the financials.
Both NYSE and the SEC are not entities to fool with and blatant inventory fraud is too easy to detect.
It's in the basement of a very large building, just look at how massive those columns are and how closely space they are. That's to hold up a huge building.
I didn't want to mentino the IGBE swindle, but since you have done so............
If this were a movie, you could bet the thieves were going to crawl into the vault through the air duct in the background.
Amazing-- that's what I came up with when I figured 3 rows x 6 stacks @ 36 kips = 21 x 36 x 1000 x 12 x $500 = $4bill. I hated structural analysis -- I had to take it twice to pass it once. I love investing. No heavy lifting and it pays better too.
If it isn’t a set or a bunch of props from a movie then they must have a pile of broken pallets setting someplace.
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