High Purity Silver With Drain Cleaner pt1

welcome back to my channel everybody sweet tips here and today what i have planned is i'm going to use the lion sugar method to refine some pure silver from these forks these forks are made of sterling silver sterling silver is an alloy of about 90 silver and 10 copper so what we're going to do is we're going to dissolve these forks in some ruto professional drain cleaner that i bought at ace hardware it's 93 concentrated sulfuric acid and we're going to dissolve the forks and then we're going to get out rinse all the copper out of the forks and then we're going to use lye and sugar to precipitate out the pure silver from the silver chloride that we're going to produce when we add some hydrochloric acid now this is a remake of a previous video that i did but it was very sloppy in my first video and the yield was very low less than half of the actual silver content is what i recovered in my last video but we're gonna try to get it up very close to uh a decent yield uh so that we can produce some pure silver three nines fine throughout history the ratio between gold and silver has been roughly 20 to 1. what that means it takes about 20 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold but recently gold has risen to a point where it was almost 120 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold gold has been rising in value relative to the dollar uh faster than silver and so now that ratio is down down to about uh i think 80 85 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold and uh eventually i believe that silver is going to catch up see gold went like this and silver didn't it's just kind of meandering right here but silver is more attractive to folks with that don't have a lot of money to invest but want to participate in the gains in the precious metals so what i think is going to happen is as gold's going to continue to go up but silver's going to go up faster until we get to that ratio of roughly about 20 to 1 20 silver to one triangle gold okay no more one more philosophizing theorizing and fantasizing what we're going to do now is we're going to get out here i'm going to process these silver forks into some investment grade pure silver bars here we go we're going to start this out by taking uh one of our forks here i'm going to cut it into pieces if i can with these cutters [Music] just kind of score a mark and break it in two it's best to cut this thing up into pieces before we get started ah see here should be able to get away with three what i have here is a rolling machine it's got two steel rollers with a crank and what we do here is i've got those pieces cut up and we uh see how the rollers open up or you can close them down so we find a place where this will fit in there and then we just run it through them steel rollers until we get the piece nice and flat [Music] i bought this rolling machine for other purposes but i figured i might as well use it for this video i had to uh drill some holes in my workbench there and mount it because you can't uh hold that thing down while you're cranking it got to put a quite a bit of force on it to get the metal roll thin and uh hoax book says to roll the metal thin and the longer you spend here at the rollers the less time you'll spend at the acids so that's why i'm rolling the metal thin here this process took way longer than i thought it was gonna take and it was a lot more difficult to crank that thing and get that uh piece of silver flattened out it tended to get longer rather than spread out sideways but the goal here is to get it thin so that the acids can dissolve it quickly normally that rolling machine is kept inside away from the work area and if you notice i left it out in the shop a couple days and the rollers have turned that's due to the acid fumes that are generated from the reactions that i do out there so uh that's why those rollers are a different color you're gonna have to explain that once i come out and seen that that's what happened the senior chief left his nice shiny rollers out in the fumes and they got rusty i'm going to be dissolving these in some sulfuric acid here's the one spoon the three pieces that i cut from it and it's uh flattened out pretty thin so the acid can get to it just increase the surface area i'm gonna do a fork without thinning it out here you can see right there it says sterling that's how we identify if we have the proper material if it doesn't say sterling on it the chances are it's probably not sterling silver but probably going to be silver plated which is a coating of silver over brass i've got two small beakers back here 600 milliliter and i'm gonna try to do this experiment with these two forks in those two small beakers so i need to cut this these strips of metal up so that that they'll fit down in the bottom of the beaker that i've selected [Music] so that we can get them in the beaker all right now i'm going to take this i want to do the experiment both ways to show you what the difference is between having your metal rolled out and having the fork solid like it is i can bend this into a little coil so that i can fit it down inside the [Music] beaker [Music] so now what we're going to do we're going to get some flamage on these uh pieces of silver here sterling silver and incinerate here we go i'm going to take these pieces so that they don't lay flat just twist them a little bit so they don't lay flat down on the bottom of the uh beaker there all right the next step is to burn each of these pieces any oil or grease that might be on here heat them to redness and then we'll set them aside let them cool pieces got to be heated like this could have heated these before i cut them up and uh would have been a lot easier but it's just another example goes to show you i'm doing this for the first time i mean i've already done a refining on this ahead of time to make sure it's going to work all right it's the first time i've done two in a row like this or two side by side i should say [Music] so uh you're watching me learn it as i go as usual i'm just heating this up now to redness so that uh you don't get any kind of grease or oil or any other kind of contamination in the reaction when i put it in the drain cleaner to dissolve it again i'm doing uh two different experiments side by side here i'm going to use a whole fork like this rolled up without being flattened out on the rollers just in case folks want to try this and you don't have a roller support let that cool off now over here number one 600 milliliter beaker put it up on the scale tear the scale to zero now we're gonna add the flattened out pieces of silver here so we can get a weight on this spoon that we flattened out in the rollers [Music] i've got 58.9 right that right on the side of the beaker 58.9 grams okay now beaker number two 600 milliliters also put it on the scale tear the scale to zero and now we're going to add the fork that we rolled up but we did not flat out it weighs 59.4 grams 59.4 grams all right now we're ready to start to experiment here i need to move this reaction down off the heat that's some silver being dissolved in my uh nitric acid solutions for my gold refining operations to consume the extra nitric that's in those solutions here's beaker number one beaker number two this has got our coiled up piece of silverware in it this has got our flattened out piece of silverware now i'm gonna add about uh 250 milliliters of bruto professional drain cleaner this is 93 concentrated sulfuric acid we're going gonna add it right into the uh to each of the uh spoons here but fill it up to about the 250 milliliter level on each one [Music] you'll notice that there's not a whole lot of reaction going on in either one of these that fluid that sulfuric acid is rather viscous now what we're going to do i'm going to move it up here both of them put them in these small beakers so that we can set them both at the same time side by side up on the heat and now we're just going to let this go just put them on it's 115 we're gonna let these things sit and heat up and boil here and dissolve the silver in sulfuric acid it's extremely important to point out that no water should be added to that sulfuric acid the silver won't dissolve if you do and you can spatter hot steaming sulfuric acid everywhere time is 2 have been on the heat now for about an hour and a half each and they really haven't begun to dissolve really well yet i had to heat down on low and went in and got me something to eat so i cranked the heat up a little bit these are still fairly solid so what we're going to do is just go ahead and let these cook a little while longer and come back and check them in a little while it's 6 00 p.m we've been on here nearly five hours and our four are solid fork is still pretty much intact yeah let's see what we got over here in the kit pieces oh yeah they're not fully dissolved but they're way further ahead than the uh than the fork is you can see there's just double pieces left in there now so spending the time rolling that metal thin as a benefit as opposed to trying to dissolve the whole fork like this without rolling it this will eventually go into solution it's just going to take much longer to get it to dissolve so we'll just let this on leave this on and let it continue to dissolve this is the following morning after six hours on the heat yesterday i turned it off and went and went to bed so it's rest and i turned this back on about 8 30 and the time right now is 10 o'clock so it's been on for about an hour and a half here you can see the fork is still pretty much left in a solid piece and over here the uh these pieces have almost all gone into solution now that's all that's left is those few little pieces of silver there so that's the benefit of rolling the metal thin before we commit it to the acid here that's all i got left in there so a few more minutes maybe about an hour all of this should be in solution and we can proceed from there time is about 10 minutes past 11. it's been an hour or so since last time we checked this look down in here i've got no silver left in the bottom of this beaker and this acid is boiling fairly vigorously you got to really watch it when you got boiling sulfuric acid you're working with here way this stuff gets on you it will instantly consume your flesh the fork is coming along it's very thin and i'm just going to leave it on and let it continue to uh dissolve uh this piece we're ready to go to the next step with this beaker number one we're ready to go to the next step i'm gonna pull beaker number one down off of the heat now it's completely dissolved and we're gonna let it sit right here and cool down a little bit and i'm gonna let beaker number two continue to heat it's still got some solid material in there that needs to dissolve [Music] and when that dissolves in beaker number two i've got a filter set up down here with some glass microfiber filters and we're gonna filter out the sulfuric acid solution through the filter into this beaker we cannot use a paper filter here because the boiling sulfuric acid or even if it's cold sulfuric acid would immediately dissolve the paper filter it's about uh past 1 30. so i guess it's taken about we started at 8 30 with this it's taken about five more hours to get this to completely dissolve so we're going to pull this down off the heat yep everything's going in the solution now just took a while turn the heat off let this cool down and we'll go from here well here we go i've got our uh silver solutions over here what we're gonna do is carefully pour them into one my micro fiber glass filters i'm going to filter out all of the uh sediment that's in here here we go now remember you can't do this with a uh paper filter because that acid will just immediately eat right through some long gloves on to make sure i don't get any of this stuff on my skin sulfuric acid is bad on human tissue so you can't get any of this stuff on you you know uh refining the silver this way as opposed to nitric acid i think i'd rather just go through the trouble of trying to find some nitric acid rather than using this method as an ongoing way uh to get my pure silver it is a way to get silver but it's very dangerous when you're working with hot sulfuric acid here what this is is a uh combination of silver sulfate and copper sulfate in this solution and if you look carefully at the side of the beaker here you'll see there's some silver sulfate crystals coming out of solution as the solution cools on the side of the beaker uh the silver sulfate is soluble and sulfuric acid and so uh that's the problem with if we let this thing cool all the way down to room temperature we'd have a glass full of silver sulfate crystals all right our beaker here has got some solids down in the bottom what i'm gonna do remember folks i'm making this up as i go i've got some sulfuric acid down here and i'm gonna use sulfuric acid to rinse the crystals and the solids out of this beaker the best i can silver sulfate is soluble in sulfuric acid it's real thick about like sugar water syrup all right i got all most of the solids out of there i'm gonna set this beaker off in the back and now we're gonna start filtering the second beaker of dissolved silver and copper here i've got most of the solution to the filter i want to give you a little demonstration here about how this stuff does on paper so drop of sulfuric acid going onto a piece of paper towel and what happens is as you can see it immediately dissolves the paper so that's why we cannot use paper filters for this operation and now what i'm going to do if you look at the glass i've got a bunch of uh crystals forming that silver sulfate coming out of solution as the as the solution cools on the sides of the beaker uh it is soluble in sulfuric acid so i can rinse the inside of the beaker with some sulfuric acid and dissolve those crystals and get them into this filter here trying to get all the solids rinsed out at the bottom of the beaker the joys of refining okay i've almost got just about all of our solids down into this funnel i'm rinsing with sulfuric acid cannot rinse with water uh because we're dealing with sulfuric acid here water will react with the sulfuric acid and not really react it'll heat up and turn to steam so fast that it will spatter hot acid everywhere so you cannot get you got to keep water completely and utterly away from the sulfuric acid solution here [Music] all right that should do it i think i pretty much got everything out of this beaker and uh we're ready to go to the next step we're going to convert the silver sulfate solution to uh silver chloride with hydrochloric acid here we go this up here and i've got some hydrochloric acid here uh this is going to be a solution of silver sulfate and copper sulfate and we can get the copper out of there by adding hydrochloric acid hydrochloric acid will convert the silver sulfate to silver chloride but it shouldn't create a complex with the copper the copper should stay in solution so we're going to add this real slow we might get some spattering here there we go a little bit of hydrochloric acid going in you can see the silver chloride forms immediately it's causing the solution to boil give it a quick stir here don't look like any silver quad we've ever seen does it you'll see in a minute it'll clean up it'll clear up it looks brown but it will turn nice and white here in a second [Music] silver chloride conversion with hydrochloric acid and a silver sulfate solution oh boy what a mess [Music] if you notice the uh the experiment is starting to uh form a layer looks like a parfait there and i'm kind of uh freaking out a little bit here you got to remember i'm kind of making this up as i go this is a larger amount than i had in uh the experiment that i tried before i made the video so i'm kind of uh playing it by the seat of my pants here i'm gonna add a little bit of tap water here as i stir it causes the brown color to go away i'm not quite sure what's going on here but it cleans the silver chloride up for me all right here's our silver chloride came out pretty good still looks a little brown i'm gonna add a little bit more hydrochloric acid here so if we get any more silver chloride to precipitate and you can see it does not so all the silver now has been converted from silver sulfate it's a silver chloride [Music] add a little bit more tap water here all right our next step is to rinse all this uh copper off of our silver floor right now down at the bottom now i'm gonna pour off the copper solution into a waste bucket down here this is a waste bucket that i've used before it's got a little bit of silver chloride the last time i did this it's going to pour off the waste solution into this waste bucket and then now we're gonna take i forgot to point the camera down at the waist bucket it's just a waste bucket from the last time i did this silver chloride conversion now what we're gonna do is uh rinse our silver chloride with hot tap water over and over until we get all of the blue liquid enriched off of our soda chloride rinsing with hot tap water over and over is the most efficient way i've found to do this uh it's better to use many small rinses rather than larger rinses it seems like the uh the blue liquid comes off better when you do a whole bunch of small rinses that's one picture of water that i went through there's the second picture that i'm starting now that'll be two pitchers of water that i've used to do these multiple rinses now what we're going to do is test some of the washed water the presence of copper i'm gonna pour some of the rinse water into this clean beaker and then we're gonna take some regular old household ammonia 10 percent ammonia i'm going to get a little bit in this dropper i'm going to put it in this sample this is a sensitive very sensitive test for copper and solution i got copper in here this will turn blue now see just a shade slight touch of blue there see that so that tells me i got a little bit more rinsing to do okay i had three pitches of water hot tap water used to rinse off our silver chloride here's my first test with ammonia for the rinse water i'm gonna get another sample out of here now we're gonna do another ammonia test and this is just regular old household ammonia to use to clean windows with or whatever and we're gonna add it to our sample and see if we still got copper present and i think we got just about every bit of copper rinsed out of our silver chloride now so what we have in this beaker is a nice clean fluffy white silver chloride cleaned up free of clot free of the copper we've rinsed the copper out so we've produced a separation uh of copper and silver all the silver's here all the copper that we took out is down there in our waste bucket rinsed out of the silver chloride so now we're gonna do a conversion with pure silver metal with lion's sugar i've got some household lye here drain opener now what we're going to do is we're going to add this lye which is sodium hydroxide to our silver chloride in here we're going to convert the silver chloride to silver oxide with this lye i'm going to stir it up now i've got a uh handheld blender here a little blade on the bottom this thing works perfect for mixing up our experiment here we go i think we pretty much got it first shot there we are looking for a black colored solid in our beaker that's kind of a little bit gray looking i'm going to add just a little bit more of the lie to this see if we can get it to turn black i've added about a half a pound of y so far and uh it doesn't quite look right to me here it's still looking a little bit of a gray color so i'm gonna add a little bit more lie to this now i've got about three quarters of our container in here we'll stir it up a little bit more now here we go [Music] that's what we want to see that's a nice black conversion to silver oxide that's black silver oxide that's the color we want to see so this took about three quarters of a pound of why this amount of silver fluoride [Music] that's looking real good there now i've got some table sugar here just a little bit we're gonna add this slowly this produces a very exothermic reaction it uh if you add the sugar too fast here you could experience a runaway boiling reaction and we'll spatter hot silver and lie everywhere i'm gonna stir this up a little bit to see the reaction taking place on top we're converting our silver oxide to pure elemental silver metal [Music] see the silver starting to form down at the bottom of the beaker [Music] [Music] all right i'm going to add just a little bit more sugar here still got to be wary of a boil over if we add too much sugar at once it could react violently see it boiling down there see that here we go that's all heat generated just from this reaction that's why you got to watch out pouring that sugar in otherwise this thing could spew out like a volcano all right i'm going to add just a touch more granulated sugar here just a little bit more i think where uh i think we're complete here you can see the cement silver down in the bottom of the beaker i say cement silver because it looks like cement silver it's uh pure silver powder three nines fine silver high purity silver down there and what we'll do next is we'll rinse all of the lion sugar off here and we'll get this into a melt dish [Music] and melt this up a nice pure silver bar is looking real good [Music] this will conclude part one of the uh video where we're making a pure silver bar out of two sterling silver forks using no nitric acid and uh in part two what we'll do is we'll get all the lye and sugar rinsed off of our pure uh silver powder out of that beaker out there that should be some very high purity silver we got all the copper rinsed out of it and all the other metals are gone and all we had left was that pure white fluffy silver chloride and once we convert that to pure silver metal we should have some nice three nines fine silver and i just wanted to give a shout out to mark and carla we are under contract for this nice pure gold bar that we refined in a previous video for troy ounces uh congratulations to them folks mark and carla thank you very much and also i'd like to uh uh put this bar up for sale this is a bar that uh we produced for the intro video for this series and uh it's about the one and a half troy ounces of three nines fine silver it does have a little bit of uh imperfections in the surface from the outgassing when i melted the bar i was using oxyacetylene the metal absorbs oxygen and then spits it back out when it uh freezes and that's what created the irregularities on the surface of this bar but i'm going to stamp it three tips and stamp the weight on it 999 fine silver and we'll offer this on my ebay store for sale okay that will conclude part one of the sterling silver fork refining thanks for watching you

Channel: sreetips

Views: 75,679

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Id: BocqoUyw1CI

Length: 41min 39sec (2499 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020