Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker
Mining and Metals and today we're gonna be doing a little experiment here with
some of the silverware. And this stuff has a sterling silver handle on it and
then the utensil part is actually stainless. And so you can see from you
know some of these handles that have been knocked off, this is the silver part,
and we're gonna knock all the handles off the silverware and try and melt them
down in our furnace and get a sterling silver block out of it. Alright so I'm
gonna try to knock the sterling silver part of this knife off, starts right here.
I'm just gonna take it on my table here hit it with the hammer and the sterling silver
split up there pretty easy. And it's full of a bunch of putty
junk, so I'll have to mix a little bit of flux in there, but you can see there's
the there's the silver part here and here's the stainless steel part of the
knife that we can just take to the scrapyard. We're really interested in
this for the value. Alright so here's the silver handles
from our silverware and here's all the stainless steel junk that we don't want. Okay here's our crucible, I ended up bashing up the handles a little bit so
they'd all fit in there and we got 12 handles total. So I'm going to take my
crucible put them in our kaolwool furnace, here this is just a couple wraps
the kaolwool on top with some fire brick. So I'll take the crucible here, put
it right in there, there's a lid behind it and we'll put a propane burner right
through there and we'll get it up to temperature, get
it on molten. I'm gonna put probably about a hundred to 150 grams of borax in
there just to help absorb any oxides and whatever that putty stuff was if there's
any of that left over I'll try and get that all into the slag so we end up with
a real nice silver button at the bottom. So here's our little furnace setup,
there's the propane bottle there, regulator that feeds this little
burner, just a single burner on this one. There's looking down the top a little
vent hole, you can see silverware in there the borax. And really that's it
that's all there is to it, it's sitting on some fire brick, very cheap to make,
very easy, works very well. Okay it's been about nine or ten minutes
now and the silver is almost completely submerged under the borax there. The
borax is starting to melt it's formed a little puddle on top. So we're like gonna
let this heat up and get ready to pour here probably another five or ten
minutes. So the whole process is going to only take about 15 minutes to melt this
stuff down, it's really going pretty fast. Here's the cone mold we're using, it's
something I built just out of steel, it just comes down to a point.
All the dense material will go to the bottom into the point there and then all
the slag will float on top and you'll have a good separation between the metal
and the slag. Okay so here's our slag stuff on top
from our silver pour, we're going to knock it over into this bin. And right there is
our silver button. It's still pretty hot, but nice flat top, a little bit of slag I had
a chip off there but no big deal. Here's the, there's the slag nice and glassy.
Alright there's our scale, zeroed out and grams.
There's our sterling silver piece that we got from our pour and Wow!
300 grams! 300 grams of sterling silver so out of 12 handles that's 25 grams a
handle. That's pretty cool, there's a lot of silver in those things! So hope you
guys enjoyed the video, it was a fun one. How to get silver out of silverware! So
thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next one.
