Yes! I want to see more silver recovery.

More silver videos would be great. I have about 15 bins of boards to depopulate and a bit more education to get before going after the PM. Love seeing different methods and techniques on recovering and refining to see which way I would like to go.

Hi Mike, VERY interesting! I only do the lye/sugar method. After I melt a button - if it's big enough - I cupel it. If not - I wait until I have several small buttons then cupel them. The coin store I sell to has an XRF machine - my silver is usually 99.0 to 99.4. I would like to build a silver cell like Sreetips if I start getting more silver to refine. Keep up the great work you do for all of us! You're an excellent instructor! Take Care, Jim

@lynnanderson5714

Жыл бұрын

Interesting

A double-sided spatula of science... a true master

I've found both to have their advantages and disadvantages. The lye/sugar method is much more labour intensive and there's a much higher risk of loss due to boil-overs. Conversion can be incomplete reducing yield and there a LOT of waste from washing. Using copper is more expensive, takes longer and is less selective (also drops PGMs) but has much less wash waste and less labour intensive. The chloride method you NEED to be involved whereas with copper you just "set it and forget it". The end purity tends to seem better with chloride but it depends on how much you wash it. Copper always seems to leave bit behind. Either way I find that if purity is your end goal then you should run it all through a electro-cell anyway so go with the method that works best for the situation. If I have time and free copper I use that. If my solution is heavily contaminated with PGMs I go with chloride. I really don't believe there is a "best" method. It all depends on what's going on with that batch.

If you refine enough gold jewelry, you will find that the silver cell DIY method (Sreetips for example) is totally worth the effort. I have always been concerned about reducing cost. I make my own Nitric by boilling down sulfuric acid from car batteries to make my concentrated sulfuric acid (like Mike does on this channel). I use potassium Nitrate (spectracide stump remover using Philip Bender's channel method). Why I like this experiment Mike, is because the better you can clean the silver, the longer I can go before cleaning out the silver cells' filter basket while simplifying the processing of the slimes. After you see that beautiful crystal silver, you will NEVER go back!!! So thank you Mike for sharing your experiences. We must all be working to "perfect" our methods. That is what makes it so much fun and rewarding.

Yes more silver Id still like to see how you purify tin.

This is what i just learned from Lithic Metals: the first half hour is when you'll precipitate out MOST of the silver onto the copper. If you leave it for longer than that, which we BOTH did, the copper breaks down and mixes with the cemented silver. In MY experience it'll melt into a green, glassy, brittle button. I was searching for a way to remove the copper without nitric though and thanks to you I'm gonna do the sulfuric method and see what happens. Good video 😅

Im surprised people suggested sulfuric. I mentioned in my last video that sulfuric would dissolve silver and that hcl is the best choice

Yes I agree 100 % I tried it out myself but the only thing was the impure bar was solid and I was getting off all the borax on the surface and the bottom and wow it came out magnificent but you can see the tint in it from the copper but I am going to make it silver cement again and try that so great video hope to see more 👍

Love the experiments. I recently smelted up 2 batches of silver. 1st batch was 6lbs-2.8oz of pure silver crystals. The 2nd batch was 7lbs-2.4oz of cement silver using copper. The cement silver bars looked a lot better then the silver crystals bars and cement silver melts a lot faster as well. Both tested as pure .9999 elemental silver. I just simply flush the silver in a buchner funnel under vacuum with boiling hot distilled water until it runs clear. I've never tired the lye & sugar method just for the simple fact you end up with so much waste to process and have to deal with. The possibility of a delayed reaction causing a boil over. No thanks. The cost of lye and sugar. I use thick copper bars. I've made my own copper bare by melting up stripped wire and have purchased 1/2" thick flat stock copper bars. Using copper is a set it and forget it technique. Give it a stir a couple times a day just to keep it active. The simpler I can keep the processes. The less headaches I could possibly have. Fun stuff all in all. I'll be looking forward in watching more of your informational KZread videos. Best wishes.

Silver chloride - lye - sugar does produce high purity silver if you wash it carefully. The risk is that you lose some silver that didn't convert and that is getting trapped in the slag / borax while melting. Any PGM group metals dissolved in the silver nitrate will end up with the wash water. A perfect method when your source is very pure, for example photographic film. For cementation, any PGM metals will cement together with the silver and end up in the silver bar. Anything else could be mostly removed by washing with boiling acid. I had a suspicion that your silver nitrate had a slight palladium contamination based on the colour of the solution. In the end you have to ask what the goal is. If you are refining to sell, does it really matter if your silver is 98% or 99.95%? Do you get such a high price that it motivates you to do the extra work to get the purity up? Silver chloride doesn't store well and gets harder to process with time. Especially if it dries up. Cementation on the other hand is a lazy way to get the silver without too much work. I have a flask with a permanent filter on and a bunch of scrap with mixed copper and silver, like relay points. Whenever I get small amounts of silver containing nitrate solutions I just pour it down through the filter and forget about it. Over time the copper goes into solution, silver and PGM:s ends up as a fine powder. Over time the copper dissolves and I'm left with a powder and solid silver chunks that's good enough to cast into anodes for a silver cell. Then the cell makes high purity silver while concentrating any PGM in the electrolyte for later recovery. The only time I create large amounts of silver chloride is when I'm recovering or refining palladium and other PGM:s, for example from MLCC:s.

I would definitely enjoy more silver recovery. I am doing this not to make a profit but for the fun of it and to maybe eventually make a ring or two. It would be really cool to collect the silver, too, and alloy my own sterling.

Yes, more silver from different sources videos.

Very cool, thank you .

Thanks Mike I really like working with silver. Building a silver cell is in my plan but I might try some chloride method i have never done that.

I also watch sreetips a lot. He uses an electrolytic Silvecell to purify his cement Silver. He loads it as Silver shot and also recovers the slimes to process for noble metals. Theoretically the Silver crystals have less surface area and I'd say that should use less rinse water.

@GingerKing304

Жыл бұрын

They do indeed and take a 3rd of the rinses

Silver! :) I have not done anything yet but my little pile of components is growing. Really curious of mosfet silver content

I like silver, and want to learn more.

Yes, more silver experiments please. Silver may not be a pricey as gold, but I would feel a lot less worse if I goofed something up during the process. Question: would have weighing the two samples before and after the acid boils been appropriate to see if anything dissolved out, or would the weight difference have been too miniscule to measure or matter? Thank you for the great video and looking forward to seeing the next one!

@omegageek64

Жыл бұрын

Probably much too small a difference for me to measure with my equipment.

@GingerKing304

Жыл бұрын

I personally boil my cement in HCL and add a few drops of sulphuric then drain, then distilled boils and rinses and the silver comes out beautifully for melting

Excellent job now it would be interesting if you sent all three into the refinar and have them assayed

I dropped some silver a while back and melted it into a small button. I melted it with borax, so naturally I wanted to remove the borax from the button. I put the button into some hot dilute sulfuric acid and put it on heat. I forgot about it and it sat on heat for several hours. When I finally got back to it, the button was gone. The sulfuric acid completely dissolved the button. Perhaps the acid was more concentrated than I thought, but The silver was dissolved into the acid. Now when I clean off the borax I carefully watch it. I even take a pipette and hit the borax with jets of the dilute mixture and watch the borax fall off. When I'm satisfied the borax is completely removed, I'll pull out the button. Apart from dropping out lead from my gold solutions, Sulfuric acid has these only 2 uses.

You said it might not be economical. Most hobbies are not economical. When I start doing the ewaste precious metals recovery I'm not going to do it for a profit, I'll bring doing it for the passion. Which I'm sure you know all about that!!

I love you videos, I have learned so many skills for how to recovery the gold from your videos, but have you ever tried to do palladium recovery, I was expecting you to demonstrated how to do the palladium recovery, Hope you can do that one day.

I personally use Mapp/Pro gas for 1/2oz or less. It produces a much better polished sheen upon cooling but good vid Mike keep em coming!

You can't test your final ingot by just looking at it! You paint a touch of pure nitric on each one and if it stays white, it's pure silver. If it's slightly yellow or brown it indicates presence of copper. The darker the spot the less pure... For absolute purity you need an electolytic cell (easy to make, plenty of videos on the subject) Good luck and thanks for your videos

I've watch lots recycling / refining videos , but do not remember how to test for purity of silver ? I do have an acid test kit for gold , silver , platinum . Thanks again

Just stumbled across your channel. Good stuff and very entertaining. You are not a chemist (easy to tell from your spelling of HCl), but you are thinking like a scientist. The lye (sodium hydroxide) and sugar method should give you 99.9% silver, or even better. Have you tried electrolysis? That will get the last trace of copper out. Subscribed.

more silver recovery PLEASE ,

can test solutions for copper using ammonia.

I think you have to use concentrated hcl to dissolve the copper

What is your source for nitric acid in Florida?

The best solution to this problem is a nitric acid wash. 1000ml water, 50-100 ml of nitric @67%, stir, pour off and filter the blue, cement out your silver from your rinse solution, save for the next batch.

A lil salt with sulfuric will dissolve copper or just salt water will too dissolve copper

What original silver recover

why not make a silver cell youtuber streetip has a full video on how to make one

Very cool experiment 😎 thank you!!! I'm at this crossroads right now. I have around 400 ounces of Sterling silverware!!! Not sure if it's economical to digest it !!!! Might just corn flake it and run it through my silver cell !!@ the prices for chemicals now days

@frantiseklaluch6605

Жыл бұрын

I have also some old continental european silverware and objects, hallmarks 800, 812, 830, 833, 875, 900, 925, 950... (sterling not as much prevalent here). You do not get better value by disolving nice sterling silverware. I am going to purify only broken pieces, not hallmarked pieces of jewellery and use such for gold quartering if needed. Also I can make pure silver sheets and wire and make something or sell it to hobby jewelers. IMHO: keep nice hallmarked silverware, as can have more than metal value (small spoons sell very good). To run sterling directly through silver cell is not good, too much copper in sterling, electrolyte will be blue and useless too fast, some purification needed before. For me it si just (kinda expensive) hobby, I do not expect any gain except having fun doing it and have some self made jewels for flexing... 😀

@jamisontaylor878

Жыл бұрын

I do it all for the stack and fun thank you 😊

Brother, have the bars shot' as to know the Percentages per method. also, would it help Melting in Portland/Crucible Method, perhaps to re-duce rincing (yet in-crease melting), Jason mentioned large amount copper be 'probem-at-ick'. as the Prophet Johan said; 'elk na-deel heb ze voor-deel', though bad thongs say it could have OR-I-Djin-at-IT from Prophet Willem ...

Hello, thanks for your experiments... I am collecting all possible methods...so far ascorbic acid and formic acid looks promissing (OwlTech)...

It's not sulphuric acid you need to boil in HCL

Trying to purify Silver that is for all practical purposes rather pure does nt click in my mind.. Unless you want silver anodes for electroplating, most silver will be alloyed with copper again to make Stirling Silver or Silver solders. I made a mini-ingot with my "cement silver" coming out of the copper ion exchange (as shown in you video) to test it with nitric acid and it came out something like 98-99 % pure enough for what I want to do with it. And OmG a fume extractor for working with 10% acid solutions? Americans are funny... Thanks for great video anyhow...

Has anyone tried using sodium persulfate to remove copper from cemented silver? Electronics use this to etch printed circuit boards.

Nitric acid to cement out silver from scrap.

The easiest and pure way of purifying silver is to build a thumb silver cell for less than 30.00 and it produces almost the same amount but 999 Fine. Melt the cement into shot and run it through the cell

@AT-os6nb

Жыл бұрын

why melt? can you not just use the cement silver in the cell directly?

@GingerKing304

Жыл бұрын

@@AT-os6nb The problem with using cement in the cell is that it clogs the anode filter and you create dirty crystal

@AT-os6nb

Жыл бұрын

thanks for that, never done silver cell so good to know

All the rinses should be run through a filter. Your losing silver. A small amount but use the same filter to dump the now clean silver and then melt. You should get all the silver that is get-able

Have you ruled out the possibility of halides and / or silver oxidation being present when you melt the powder? I'm no expert, just curious

Might be Palladium seeing how it's green and not blue.

why dont you try silver cell?

@omegageek64

6 ай бұрын

One day.

I've also experienced that silver coming from AgCl tends to look much better than cement silver, so this was very interesting. I wonder if bubbling air into the acid solutions (and not boiling, at least at first) would get more copper out of by allowing more oxygen to dissolve (more contact and higher solubility at lower temps). Also, I'd love to see a melted sample from the same batch of cement silver as the boiled samples, to see how much improvement there is. Göran also makes a good point about PGMs, which could be altering the appearance of the silver and are not removed with hydrochloric or sulfuric boils. That would explain why the boiled samples look better after the copper is removed but not as good as the AgCl process silver.

Since you made yourself a cupelling oven, just cupel your silver after cementing on copper, and your silver will be basically .999 fine... it you want it purer, you can also get crazy and do electrolytic process, which let's be honest, for the price of silver, is it really worth the effort?... Gold or PGM's... ya electrolytic is a great way of purifying these materials, but silver... meh.