Purifying Cement Silver With Acid Boils

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.

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.

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.

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

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 😅

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

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

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

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 👍

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.

more silver recovery PLEASE ,

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 YouTube videos. Best wishes.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Very cool, thank you .