Trying to sell lot of antique keys Where.

jmw81786

I’m trying to sell these old keys and locks they came from my grandfather’s collection of over 20000 keys could anyone tell me where I could get the most out of them. Any one know of any collectors or museums that would be interested. Thanks. : )

Paul Prescott

An indication of where you are located in the US would be useful. I will however be frank, 999 out of every 1000 keys are most likely worth nothing more than scrap value. When you have such a huge number even looking them over it likely to take a lot of time and effort, so you either try and sell the whole lot to one collector (hard - very few collectors would want such a qty) or try and compensate someone knowledgeable for their time in checking them out.

In the former case I would guess that you would only get a small premium on the price of scrap metal. If you opt to have them checked it will probably cost you some $$ to do so but if you have anything good or rare it’s the best chance of it being recognized.

I would advise against talking to a regular antique dealer etc, this is a highly specialized field and in my experience general dealers or auction houses know nothing about it.

jmw81786

Yea. I’m in SC I only have like 25 pieces there are a lot of Locks in there to and a lot of them look to be hand molded some of them are very very old Chinese I think . And other types they appear to be very old my grandfather traveled every where to collect keys where would I go to get them checked out or looked at

Dean Nickel

I agree with Oldlock. If I had to move that large number of keys I would at least look for larger keys in that collection. If you look for keys that have names of lock companies (PF Corbin, Russwin, Sargent, Yale, Norwalk, ect..) or are larger than say 3 inch would be keys that might be worth something but not much more. But as a whole the key blank collectors are rare on the whole as are lock collectors.

Paul Prescott

I’m confused, do you have 25 or 20,000 ?

jmw81786

no i only have 25 keys they are from a collection of over 20000 keys here is a pic of them

jmw81786

Does anyone know of a place or a person where I could have them appraised. And any idea how much it would cost? Thx

Paul Prescott

So do you have the whole collection or just the items shown ?

If the latter - Some close up pictures of the individual padlocks & details of any markings and we can probably advise you further.

jmw81786

OK ill get those pics up later this afternoon yes these are the only ones I have he had the rest donate to a meusem