Refining POUNDS of SILVER!!

welcome back today i got a something a bit different to show you guys i'm going to refine some scraps drilling silver using 70 nitric acid so the silver i'm going to be using i tried refining before but i didn't have enough acid so it's left over from that run and it weighs right around a pound and a half the nitric acid i bought from a seller on ebay i'm hoping i'll only need one liter but i've got two just in case i'm not going to go too deep into the safety shenanigans because that's boring but i will say gloves are optional don't breathe the orange fumes and wear my glasses if nitric acid splashes up into your eyes it can cause permanent blindness and nobody wants that now to get this reaction started i'm going to add about half distilled water and half nitric acid to a container that i trust isn't going to randomly break on me next i'm going to slowly start adding some silver to it and you can see it start reacting right away so what's happening is the nitric acid is attacking the silver creating silver nitrate and nitric oxide gas not to be confused with nitrous oxide or laughing gas you turkey also sterling silver is usually 7.5 copper which creates copper nitrate that's what turns the liquid blue [Music] it's good to cover the glass with a lid when the nitric oxide gas comes into contact with water it turns back into nitric acid it's important not to add all the silver and nitric acid right away because the reaction can get violent and boil out of the container instead add your silver and nitric in small amounts when the reaction stopped generating enough of its own heat i moved it onto a hot plate set at 300 degrees fahrenheit also things were going so well that i decided to add some other scrap silver i had to the pot i didn't weigh it so unfortunately i won't get a yield percentage i continue adding silver and nitric until all the nitric acid is used up and there is some leftover undissolved silver in the bottom of the glass once it's completely finished reacting turn off the hot plate and let it cool down to room temperature now i'm going to pour the silver and copper nitrate solution through filter paper into separate containers i'm also going to wash the leftover contents of my container with distilled water at the bottom of our glass we have the leftover silver gemstones and any gold pieces that were in the mix also i believe that gray stuff is silver chloride which means my reaction must have been contaminated with some chlorine even small amounts of chlorine will cause this to happen i'll have to deal with that later now that it's done filtering i'm going to add in some pure copper bars [Music] and you should be able to see the pure silver forming on it right away so the reaction that's going on here is the silver nitrate would much rather be copper nitrate so the copper becomes copper nitrate and the silver nitrate becomes elemental silver right on the surface of the copper bars after letting it sit overnight i'm going to give it a quick stir to make sure all the silver has come out of solution [Music] you'll know the reaction is finished when you can dip in a shiny piece of copper and the solution no longer discolors it here you can see it's still dropping silver out of solution all right that looks pretty good to me now i can remove my bars from the jars [Music] i think it's interesting to see just how much of the copper has been dissolved now to get rid of the copper nitrate i'm going to pour it off and wash it with distilled water until it's completely [Music] clean then i'm going to place the silver on my hot plate to drive off the rest of the [Music] moisture [Music] dad gum that's a pile of silver plus there's still more in this jar too i got this little graphite quarter half and three-quarter mold to pour the bars into i'd like to pour bigger bars but i don't have the right setup for it so this will have to do so the setup i have going on here is i got my propane torch to keep my mold hot i got my little melting dish which i'll be putting the silver in and i got my torch to melt the silver [Music] down [Music] [Applause] [Music] when i'm done pouring all the bars i make a dilute solution of sulfuric acid on the hot plate to remove any flux [Music] so the total amount of silver we ended up with is right around 720 grams which comes out to about 23 ounces i'm by no means a chemist so if you see anything hokey well it's all a bit hokey let's say fundamentally flawed then give me a loving rebuke in the comments also you guys are in luck because i'm feeling extra christmassy so i'm going to stamp and give a couple of these bars away down in the comments merry christmas everybody [Music]

Channel: MC Art and Tool

Views: 92,712

Keywords:

Id: HOGheYx9X4U

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020