Silver Refining Pure Silver Crystal Part 1of3

hello YouTube viewers welcome to my youtube channel i am sri tips and today what we're going to talk about is silver refining laid out on this table in front of me here is a group of sterling silver items candlestick holders and some sterling silver bowls some sugar and creamer dispensers made out of sterling silver salt pepper shakers and back here I've got some sterling silver flatware and over here I've got a bunch of ninety percent the United States minted silver coins and what I'm going to do with this material is demonstrate how I refine it into pure silver crystal okay before we get started here I just wanted to give you a quick overview of the material that I'm gonna be using to refine here this is sterling silver I don't know if you can see that marking on there it says sterling silver on the bottom if a maker of these products is going to go to the trouble of making it out of fine silver or sterling silver which is 92.5 percent silver what they'll usually do is put a mark on the bottom of their pieces and normally if it's not mark sterling silver it's not going to be sterling silver so you can see the mark there I don't know if you can see that or not some of them are real faint but they will be marked on the bottom as sterling silver okay what we have over here is a grouping of solid sterling silver flatware and the way that I determine if this is actually silver or not rather than silver plated is on the back of this piece the maker will put a stamp on there that says sterling if it doesn't say sterling on the back of this piece of silverware then it's probably gonna be silver-plated it'll say sterling or write on it I got a couple of sets of sterling there and we're gonna be using that to refine with but one more component of the refining here is a bunch of scrap jewelry that I've got here in this little container I've already removed all the springs and non silver metal and other material stones and so forth from this jewelry and we'll be working with this as well step 95 sterling silver jewelry I've got a bunch of silver coins there's a bunch of silver dollars here some dimes got a whole couple bags of quarters some more silver dollars more quarters a bunch of tubes of quarters here there's a whole bunch of sacks of 90% silver dimes back here I bought some items at a garage sale here recently it's silver coins silver dimes here and they had a sitting in the back shelf Derek with a price tag for 20 bucks so I bought every one of them but they had so what we're going to do is we're going to take and begin by mechanically cleaning these pieces of silver and what I mean by that is I'm gonna remove all nonmetallic material from all this so that all I have is sterling silver the coins I'm not going to refine those I'm gonna keep those just like they are and I would recommend to anybody thinking about doing this to leave the silver coins like they are they're a known quantity of silver minute by the United States government and they will be have they had tend to have a little bit of a premium value to them so I wouldn't mess with those you can you can use the silver coins and convert the silver coins into the pure silver crystal here but I would recommend you don't do that and this pure silver crystal is what our final product will be when I get done refining the silver and as you can see it's real high purity silver probably close to about five 9s fine some of this has been run back through the silver cell two times so it's been double refined and this is some very high purity silver this is a silver that I used to make my pure silver bars and we're going to show you how to do that we're going to convert all this silver material right here into pure silver crystal let me show you how to do that right now okay what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to go ahead and clean this silver up I'm gonna make sure and wear a pair of gloves here you don't even want to think about doing this without gloves because this metal is razor-sharp and it will slice your fingers apart what I'm gonna do is take all the way to the material out put it in the trash and then put the pieces of silver right down here in this little bucket [Music] [Music] all righty I've got all the weighted material taken out of the sterling pieces I've got my flatware here my jewelry items here these are pieces of bowls that I've taken the weighted material out one thing I really have left to do here is these knives and I just want to show you one of these right quick the knife has a stainless steel blade and it's got a sterling handle with some cement inside of it so what I have to do is break that get it started here and just kind of slowly peel the metal back away down the length of the blade there it's a pain in the butt to do takes a long time to do it and so I just want to just demonstrate that these knives are not all sterling silver this part here there's some weighted disa stainless and there's some weighted material some cement in here but this coating is going to be sterling silver and I found that these knives are about 8 or 10 grams of sterling each all right I've got all the sterling silver flatware here here's all the jewelry items that have been cleaned up mechanically here's all the silver dishes and candle holders and salt and pepper shakers and so forth here's some more of that material here and here if you recall from some of my gold refining videos this is going to be dilute nitric acid that was used to dissolve out silver out of the cold that I hadn't courted and I saved it in these jars well these jars are full of silver solution and they're still nitric acid in here that can dissolve silver so I'm going to use this up by pouring these silver jars into these large 4 liter beakers here and I'm going to use this solution first to go ahead and dissolve the first bits of my silver here okay I've got the dilute nitric acid solution that already has a bunch of silver and other metals in it in my beaker here I'm gonna go turn my fan on a torch I'm gonna start burning all this metal getting it to redness burning all the flammable material off of it and then I'll add it to the beaker [Music] burning the metal like this burns off any oils greases wax or other combustible material and if I didn't do this and if I just threw it straight in the acid those of those materials could cause a greasy film to form inside my solution something I want to try to avoid here now I'll do the same with this side again this is silver that was dissolved from imported gold solutions it still has active nitric in it that can dissolve silver so I'm going to use it first to use up all the residual nitric that's in this solution that I'm pouring in this beaker [Music] I had the silver to this beaker [Music] you you [Music] [Music] [Music] okay both of these are pretty full now dad put the lid on cut some heat on them and we'll go ahead and let these react [Music] the reaction has been taking place now for about 30 minutes or so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and there's some room in there now because the silver is dissolved I'm a good add some more silver you oK we've got both beakers back full of silver again still got quite a bit of stuff left here that has to be incinerated and then add it to the to the two beakers so we'll just keep doing this until all that nitric acid runs low and then we'll go from there both the beakers have been on the heat now for about a little over an hour if you notice this one here has a slowed way down and the reaction hardly any fumes in there this one's still going pretty good but it slowed down significantly as well so what I'm gonna do I've got some water here it's still water just a little over 200 ml and I'm gonna add some nitric acid to that slowly and make a 50/50 solution of dilute nitric acid here [Music] now what I'm going to do is check the temperature on this it's going to be hot so I got to be careful adding that dilute nitric in there [Music] and it looks like we've got 186 degrees Fahrenheit eighty five point six degrees Celsius so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and pour a little bit more nitric acid in this see if I can get this reaction and visit configurated a little bit I'm gonna add it real slow here because it's gonna want to take off right quick cuz it's hot [Music] alright I'm just gonna go ahead and add just a few ml there just to get this thing going well I add it slowly a little bit at a time until we get all that silver dissolved both beakers have been on here a little over two hours now the reaction is stalled in both of them which means that all the nitric or most of it anyway has been used up out of my silver solutions that I began with so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add some 50:50 dilute nitric acid here to each one and get things going again and I add it slow first what do that let me get the temperature here alright that's eighty four point six degrees centigrade 184 Fahrenheit [Music] that's 190 Fahrenheit eighty seven point eight centigrade now I'm gonna go ahead and add some nitric acid here do this real slow because it's gonna be hot it'll take off on me if I put it in there too fast [Music] [Music] just let these continue to dissolve here right this looks like it's getting ready to run away on me so I'm gonna go ahead and take the lid off bring it out off the heat and let it almost fill into this container here it takes off on me which it did not thankfully [Music] [Music] you you and now this wasn't starting to go run away on me what I'm gonna do is take the lid off they get off heat for a minute let it calm down [Music] what happens here is when I added that 50:50 dilute nitric it goes in and it kind of due to the difference in density between the 50:50 dilute nitric and the solution that's already in the beaker the dilute nitric will tend to hang around on the top of the solution here and just kind of float on top of it and then as it begins to react the bubbling action starts to stir it up and then it gets down here and starts stirring from underneath and it gets the whole solution going and then it comes in contact with that hot metal and then the reaction he gets real vigorous like that so I think we can control it just by taking it off the heat there letting it simmer down here for a few minutes and we'll put it back on the heat you you now things have calmed down a little bit go ahead and add a little bit more silver to each one you you when that jesting silver like this the goal is to get the silver dissolved as quickly and safely as possible it requires a little bit of a balancing act between getting the right amount of silver and the right amount of acid the right amount of heat all to come together in a safe way to get this silver dissolved as quickly as possible you both of the beakers have been on here the acting now or right at seven hours and I've got all of the the sterling silver from the bowls and the cantilevers into the beakers now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and like just turn this team down on low and just let it sit for a while and use up all the mobile nitric acid that I can and then we'll go ahead and cool this off filter it out the silver has been on now I left it on overnight on low heat and so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off and let these solutions cool down all right we got a 74 point for Celsius part 66 Fahrenheit on listen we got 131 Fahrenheit 55.2 Celsius and I left those things on overnight went in went to bed and I came out this morning it's been about eight hours since I knocked off so these things have been sitting there for about eight hours we'll go ahead turn the heat off now and let these cool down so we can do a filtration on it's important to point out here that there's a bunch of undissolved silver left in the bottom of these beakers I've even got one spoon over here I put him in last night before I went in and went to bed this one's got a spoon in it and it's got some left all the silver down here this is important to have because we want some leftover silver in the bottom of the beaker to ensure that we've used up all the free nitric acid when I go to the next operation which is cementing this silver out with copper I do not want a bunch of free nitric acid in there because it will needlessly consume the copper and it will dissolve the silver just as fast as it cements out onto the copper so I want to consume all the free nitric acid out of these containers before I do this filtration and I'm going to the next step I've taken both of the jars of silver down off of the heat they're down here cooling now I want to say it one more time this is so important notice that there's undissolved pieces of silver in each one of these containers that is important because we want to see undissolved pieces in each container to make sure that all the free nitric acid has been consumed before we go to the next step okay I'm just going to do a little review here I've got all the pieces of sterling silver that I had in this bucket that's all inside these containers and most of it has been dissolved haven't even touched the jewelry yet and I put a couple of spoons in here to consume excess nitrate but other than that all the silver flatware still has to go in so that's what we are right now both solutions have been allowed to cool down to ambient temperature which today is about 90 degrees Fahrenheit all right that was 34 centigrade 93 Fahrenheit this one says 89 Fahrenheit 31.8 centigrade all right here I have a tube to fill this up with distilled water gotta use distilled water here because we're working with that so we're nitrating the solution can't use time together I started my back you pump now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stick this tube inside the beaker and siphon the solution down here into a a flask through a filter put the end of my thumb over the to stick the other end up here in my solution let my finger off the tube and then salata siphon the silver nitrate solution down here into the funnel [Music] it's better than pouring it if I was to pour it some of the contents has settled in the bottom of this beaker pouring it over into the funnel into the filter there would cause some sediment to come over and would quickly load up that filter paper so siphoning out like this is much better [Music] you [Music] yep maxed out this flask so what I'm gonna do go ahead pull this glass is full of is over off all right in here this one out of the way full cheerleader beaker or four liter flask full of dissolved sober and I've got a couple liters left up here on the Dave who said this Glasgow just continued during operation I've got about 2 liters of solution up here left to our filter I got my tube full of water got my filter flashed down here I'm going to go ahead and siphon it on in and continue that filtering operation till I get all the silver solution filtered into these flasks you you want to take a look at this filter here it's got some sediment in it from that filtering operation rinsed out real good with some distilled water that sentiment could contain gold and possibly some platinum metals so I want to save this filter and put it in with my filters for Richard silver is a carrier of platinum group metals in gold so there's a good chance that there might be a little bit traces of that kind of metal in this side in this residue in this filter years I want to say that nitric acid dissolves both silver and palladium all by itself here's our solution nice and crystal clear here's our other one in the four liter jar last they're nice and clear ready to go to the next step of the process I've got both of these solutions here filtered nice and clear ready for the next step for right now I'm gonna just set those over here out of the way [Music] and I want to turn my attention back to the the flatware there I've got some distilled water here it's got a little bit of a copper in it from some previous rinses I save when I rinse out my Smith's silver I say that still water it's like we use it what I'm going to do is add distilled water it's got a little bit of copper in it but you don't you could use just regular distilled water will put about a liter these beakers up with about a liter of this water maybe 1200 ml or so [Music] and then what we're gonna do is start adding some of this flatware to these speakers so we can start dissolving the flatware now I'm gonna start burning these pieces of flatware down here these aren't going to be as bad as the sterling silver items it shouldn't have to eat them the redness just heat them up a little bit burn off any kind of oils of junk that might be on there [Music] all the silver flatware has been incinerated I'm gonna go ahead and set these now back on the back on the burners here and then what we're going to do next is add a little bit of heat here [Music] and go ahead and pour some nitric acid into each one probably about a hundred ml and each one just to start off with it should be at room temperature which is not that hot right now so we'll get away with doing this right now but once this heats up it'll be a different story I don't really carefully add this stuff once it gets real hot but for right now I'm going to add about 100 ml each beaker just to kick things off okay we're just going to continue to add small doses of I've got some dilute nitric acid here keep bad the small doses of this until we get all this to dissolve just like we did before with the other material this is what I'll be using to cement the silver out of the silver nitrate solutions this is row max copper wire I got all here some tubing here I got all this stuff at yard sales this bundle here was free the woman says she's tired of it sitting in her garage told me I could take it for free that's probably about 10 12 pounds of copper there these were all couple bucks apiece people buy stuff a to buy this wire to do a project and then they only use a small bit of it and then it just sits in their garage and I buy it I think I bought this one for 5 bucks at a yard sale and my wife got these two for a couple dollars a piece and she bought this for three bucks out of the flea market so this is what's available to me so this is what I'll use to cement out the silver from the silver nitrate solutions okay here I've got some copper wire this is some outdoor wiring it's pretty thick gauge what I'm gonna do is show you a way that I found to uh to get the skin offered you know it's to strip it get the coating off of it just take a razor blade here we've got a little screw with a piece of plastic underneath of it and I just kind of use it as a guide and I hold the razor blade here there's probably a better way to do this but this works for me and I just kind of pulled the wire along that screw in the chair there until I get it all the way down I've got this is a six foot piece of wire here and this works okay I mean there's like I said there's probably somebody out there that has a way better way to do this but this works for me and then I just peel it off all the way down and there's our copper wire all stripped off all right each individual strand also it has a coating on it so I just take the razor blade not find a perfect angle to hold it at and then I just pull it through and strip to flip the coating off I'm using copper wire here because that's what I have and it's probably not the best choice copper busbar is probably better and the reason this is not a good choice is because when it cements down what it'll do is it'll leave a little tiny pieces of wire in your silver see how that comes right off all right I'm gonna do one more here just kind of hold the blade at an angle and get it started and it just kind of peels that coating right off as you pull it through pretty handy works okay when you get to the end just pull the coating off like so all the way down the face of water I guess this isn't necessary you could just wine that copper up but what I did is I've got a little meat grinder here that I bought at the thrift store for three bucks and I fastened a piece of wooden rod on the end of it with some screws what I do to make this coil and have a hole right there pull it a little wire put it down in the hole like so and flip the switch and hang on [Music] [Music] now when I get is a little coil of wire here certain that will hold a little band looking on hang on okay while I'm waiting for the flatware to dissolve what I'm going to do is go ahead and start de a-- cementing of the silver here I'm going to add a bottle leader distilled water to each of these beakers here okay here's the copper coils I'm just going to go ahead and lower him down into the distilled water like so little hooks on them so they can hang on the edge of the beaker [Music] now I'm going to add some of the silver solution and start the the reaction here to cement the silver out of this solution using this copper wire it's gonna add it slowly it should start immediately you should start seeing some silver forming on those pieces of copper [Music] okay what's happening here is the silver that's in solution is coming out of solution on the pieces of copper wire that's pure silver powder they're forming on the copper and that as it gets heavy it just kind of drops off of there while this silver is coming out of solution on to the copper the copper is dissolving and going into solution here the two metals are trading places the copper is going into solution and the silver is coming out of solution that's pure silver metal coming out of there [Music] [Music] going ahead warn the other solution than the other beaker here get that started [Music] you okay if you take a look at this silver here its cementing out nicely onto the copper I don't have any fumes forming or a bunch of silver floating at the top just something I want to try to avoid if we had excess nitric acid in here but what happened was the copper would be dissolving the solutions would be eating up and we'd have a bunch of fumes coming off of this but we don't see that in here that's a good thing that's what we want to do the sanitation process what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and leave this leave this metal to cement out and all the night going Fed expressed and let me come out in the morning you should have some nice cement silver in these beakers today is day three of our silver refining video here's our cement silver this has been allowed to settle all night back here I've got the flat we're still dissolving what I'm going to do is I'm going to start this off by I've got about 300 ml of distilled water in our beaker here I'm gonna add some nitric acid to make a 50/50 the solution here of dilute nitric acid and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and add some of that to the silver flatware up here get this started back up everything's at room temperature so I can add this acid in a little bit more volume of acid here than I normally would if it was hot [Music] and this will just start to reaction I'm gonna turn the heat on low down here and we'll let that react now I'm going to turn my attention to the cement silver here it's been allowed to react overnight go ahead and stir this up the silver down here in the bottom of the beaker will tend to trap some of the silver nitrate solution so I want to stir that up real good make sure and get any silver nitrate solution that's trapped down in the side to cement silver top the bottom there release that so that the copper it can come in contact with that copper and get all the rest of the silver Samantha doubt and now I'll just let these go ahead continue to resettle our since I stirred these up the pieces of copper wire are very thin now and so what I'm going to do is rather than try to reuse these still got a little bit to them but I'm gonna go ahead and stick them down here in this bucket this bucket here is full of copper I put all my copper refining waste down here and so what we're gonna do is pull the copper on out of each of these see this one here is kind of just went to pieces that's the problem with using wire it has a tendency to do this go to pieces on you the best material I think to use for cement and silver here is some copper busbar and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and put this a residual copper it's real small pieces if you can see that's real fine piece of wire there I'll put this in my store less like my the stockpot for silver keep that decile still work alright I got all the copper wire out of this one got all the copper wire out of this when there's still a piece of copper pipe in here I'm gonna reuse that so I'll just leave that in there all these silver has been cemented out of these solutions now so all I've got is a bunch of copper but what I'm gonna do is put them down here in this bucket it's gonna pour this off buckets full of copper if there's any other precious metals in this solution they'll cement out on that copper there and it once the all the precious metals are out of the solution this blue liquid which is up copper nitrate will get added to my stock or off my waste bucket and for waste processing the silver might go over with this that's quite alright because I'll be recovering the silver out of this and then the other precious metals that cement out on all my silver waste goes into this bucket smell cop there's a perfect example of what I was talking about little piece of copper wire here what happens is that copper gets consumed during a segmentation process leave little bits a copper like that in here that's why wires not a good choice here all right I'm gonna add a few more pieces of silver to each one of these beakers more coils of silver that I got silver not silver copper wire that I coiled up I'm using copper here because that's what I have it's a readily available source of copper and can be used for cementation of silver it's just not as convenient as like a solid piece of bus ball or if you notice in here I've got some piece of copper pipe that I cut open and stuck in there and put some more copper in here now I'm gonna add some distilled water to each one about a liter of distilled water to each one what happens is you don't want to put the fully concentrated nitric or fully concentrated silver nitrate in here it'll passivate the copper form a hard crust on the copper and then the cementation process was stopped so you want to add some distilled water this process takes a lot of distilled water here's our silver nitrate concentrate solution we're just gonna pour that in now and we'll just let this set and let that silver come out of solution on that compliment okay we're at the conclusion of day three here of the silver refining video just gonna check these things out see where we're at here's our silver at the bottom of the beaker here it's been cementing out now for about two or three hours [Music] here's our other jar silver relieves ESET till tomorrow if you look down in here here's our copper wire it's still pretty good shape who's gonna lead these set in here overnight here's the copper wiring the other beaker they're just leave these set overnight now then look at these jars up here you notice these have been on about eight hours now and this one here almost all the pieces of silver are completely dissolved down Ellen a little bit uh remnants of silver left down in there but this one over here got quite a few pieces left so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna transfer some of that he's the silver from this jar over into this one I want a little bit of silver left over when this reaction is complete to make sure I've used up all the yo nitric acid that's available in here to take a couple pieces see how that's all eroded away and ate up the ass I just want to make sure I got some silver in this jar over here that will use up any a nitrate so the jars are eaten should do it slick these set now I'm gonna turn everything off it's the end of day three well this will conclude part one on the silver refining video as you can see there's many many more steps in silver refining than there is in gold refining I've got it to the point where I've got the silver cemented out out there and now what we'll do is we'll pick right up where we left off when I started part two going out very soon it should be out in the next couple days but I try to make these videos as detailed as I possibly can remembering when I first started refining about eight years ago now how nice it would have been to have some videos like these ones that I'm putting out to refer to when I went to try to do some of these processes as a result the video right now is already about an hour long so I'm going to go ahead and publish this video in multiple parts this will conclude part one we'll pick right up with part two

Channel: sreetips

Views: 234,950

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Id: QZYbejwFS4U

Length: 57min 37sec (3457 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018