Sreetips Silver Recovery From Brazing Rod

hello YouTube welcome to my channel today I'm going to be trying to extract some silver from some silver solder it's called stay SIL 15 I bought this at national welders that's the place I buy my gasps my oxy acetylene gasses for my torches on the shelf and so I bought a stick of it I think it was about $50 and stay still 15 I looked up the datasheet and the 15 means that there's 15% silver in this I'm gonna start the experiment by laying the sticks of silver solder on a scale here there's 28 of them in the package it's gonna lay them on the scale here and get a weight in grams 455 0.84 55.8 now on the weight got 450 five point eight grams I'm gonna multiply that since it's 15% silver by 0.15 that gives us 68 point three seven grams of pure silver divide that by 31 point one which is two point one nine 20 ounces that's how much silver we should be extracted from this silver solder we'll see what happens I'll begin the experiment by cutting the pieces of solder into smaller pieces so that they can fit inside this beaker as I was cutting I noticed that the each stick is marked multiple times it says Harris 15 I'll be working in a fume hood here to vent the gases away from me as I work go ahead turn that on I've got the silver solder in a 2-liter beaker here with a cover on it when I add some distilled water to it about 500ml place it on the heat turn the heat on about medium I'll be dissolving the mela with concentrated nitric acid mixed with distilled water to form dilute hot nitric acid go ahead and add some right now I'm adding about I'll see fit the hundred ml something like that it's about 100ml their head and cover it up and we'll see what happens here and the solution is turning blue that's an indication that we got Carrefour going to the solution Yemenite to hot glue tonight you can dissolve the copper and the silver should dissolve everything in this silver solder brazing garage get everything to go in solution so proud sticks of silver solder has been on the heat now with dilute nitric acid boiling for about 30 minutes I'm gonna go ahead and add some more nitric acid here I've gotta add it slowly because this solution is hot we'll react right vigorously when I pour that nitric in there I've been getting some requests for a thermometer or temperature readings on my experiments so hit it with the digital thermometer there you see it's 157 degrees inside there they had another 250 ml of distilled water here so that the metal has someplace to go as it dissolves now I'm gonna add some more i-90 gas to it we're gonna go ahead and add the rest of the nitric acid and that's about 200 250 ml of nitric acid so far inside the beaker there the experiments been on the heat now for about two and a half hours and I've got a precipitate forming inside the beaker and it started to give me a little bit of steam hammer here or the steam explosions caused a bigger to shake well then took it off the heat add this distilled water - banging pretty good so I don't want that to happen while I've got the lid off now I'm going to add some more nitric acid just a little bit I've got a little beaker here with about 250 ml more nitric acid I'm gonna add a little bit of that to this see what kind of reaction we get here I've turned the heat down to low I'm gonna put throughout the experiment back on that burner here and try to continue with some lower heat to prevent that hammer that steam hammer from happening I'm gonna add a few more ml of nitric acid just let this cook for a while probably another 50 ml or nitric there as you can see there's some precipitate that's formed on the bottom of the beaker I'm not quite sure what that is I'm hoping silver chloride so that's up so now we get the silver out of this and I'm going to continue with this experiment trying to get everything to go into solution it's been on there for about two hours and not 45 it's been four hours since we started this and I'm gonna add some more nitric acid here the reaction going all right we've been on the heat now for a little over five hours I thought this was gonna be a quick and easy one but it's turning out to be a little bit more than I suspected this is another 200 ml of nitric acid that I'm adding here I've got 200 plus 250 plus this 200 so to be 650 so kind of 50ml and nitric so far and I think right around a leader of Stillwater the silver solder has been on the heat in dilute nitric acid for about seven hours now and I'm gonna go ahead and add me about another 75 ml of nitric acid here so far I've got about 650 in there and about 1 liter of water and get some precipitate building up inside it I don't quite know what it is but we're going to keep on with this until we get a result you you the experiment has been on low heat for the last 12 hours it is a almost 24 hours later since I started the experiment and as you can see it's been sitting there for 12 hours at about 130 degrees Fahrenheit I added another 100 ml of concentrated nitric acid for a total of about 800 ml of concentrated nitric acid the experiment so far there's a precipitate that has formed inside the beaker close to the sticks half been dissolved now imma go ahead they just off to eat or it off like to reciprocate switch over why what I'll do now is transfer the solution out of the reaction vessel back here on the heat into this clean beaker and I'm gonna put the experiment back on the heat and add some distilled water and continue trying to get everything to go into solution here about 500ml got about a hundred ml of concentrated nitric acid here add that to the beaker get it on somebody that pollute precipitating now I know what that is stir this and then I'm going to add some hydrochloric acid to this let's see if we can get the silver chloride come out of solution we're going to add the hydrochloric acid it's the solution see if we simply take some silk law right just add a little bit at first see what happens here and we do get a bloom of silver chloride it looks like some kind of precipitate I'm gonna add a dash more of the hydrochloric acid here and see if anything else superteen out don't really look like it and that's looking like silver chloride those blocks looking back inside the reaction best computers she different things go on was like the rods are mostly dissolved the brazing iron is closer to dissolve I've got some precipitate down at the bottom of the beaker here it's white looking stuff and some great looking stuff quite sure what all that is we're trying to get all the rest of this to go into solution and keep going with the experiment see how much trouble we can get out of this the experiment has been on now for just a little over 24 hours now temperature inside there's 163 degrees and now I turn the heat up just a touch I've got some nitric acid here about 100ml when I add 100ml more nitric acid to the experiment try to get everything to go into solution it should be about a liter of nitric acid that I've added your water give it a quick stir here it's been 36 hours since I started the experiment here I've had this thing on heat the whole time temperature in there is 170 degrees Fahrenheit and if you notice everything all I've got is little sticks of precipitate left I think all the metals gone into solution just about now there's still a little bit of metal left there it's kind of crumbling though breaking apart I don't know if that's metal or some other kind of substance in there anyway we're gonna go ahead and pour this off and try to precipitate the silver chloride out of this solution and continue on okay we're going to go ahead and pour this into our to our large brief speaker here and that see if we can get some silver chloride form and yes it is warming up nicely that's what we want to see you right there this is a quick stir here it looks like we've got enough of the hydrochloric acid in there to get all the silver to up form silver chloride so the reaction is complete let this settle out and then we'll rinse that chloride off real good now we'll convert that to pure silver metal with some lye and sugar want to take a look down into the reaction beaker here there's still some sticks left in there along with some other precipitate probably some copper compound so I didn't get 100% of the silver solder the brazing rod to go into solution I could probably continue this was more dilute nitric acid on the heat but I'm gonna go ahead and call it for now we're gonna go ahead and go with the so hard that we got precipitating the bottom of this beaker I'll cyclin the waste into a waste bucket here I've got a tube full of water put my thumb over one end block it off with the other end into the waste all the waste fluid out into this bucket down you got some hot tap water here leaks the silver flied off with some hot tap water and the civil fluoride settles quickly go ahead and siphon this off into the waste puppy what I'll do is I'll transfer this this blue solution that I'm cycling off it's waste transfer it off to my waste treatment bucket it's full of minor than the copper will cement out on that and he trace amounts of our silver chloride that's down in that waste solution I'll rinse those out recover those you you this is the silver chloride that I recovered from the silver brazing rod I'm gonna transfer it to a tall beaker here so we converted to pure silver metal with Lion sugar I've got a handheld blender here that I bought from the thrift store got a little blade on the end of it I'm trying to use that to do the conversion here I got some sodium hydroxide here I'm gonna add about I'm not gonna measure anything I'm just gonna dump some in and we're going to try to convert the the silver chloride to a black colored silver oxide you can see down at the bottom there it's already starting to turn black here we go with the blender and see how this is gonna work his first time I've ever done this I will just have to see how it works we're pretty good stirring it around down in there I don't see a whole lot of white silver chloride left and that's a pretty flat color it's kind of a grayish color I'm add just to touch more of this sodium hydroxide I probably got a total of maybe four or five tablespoons in there this is gonna be an exothermic reaction it's gonna heat up pretty good there see it's 173 degrees more rinsing off water here you don't have to use distilled water tap water is okay I'm gonna add some sugar I just want to get a reading on the heat inside of here it says 116 it's cooled off significantly this sugar is really gonna make it yeah it's pretty little table sugar like you put your coffee you see a turning color down there its coating the inside of the beaker with silver there goes public this is a highly exothermic reaction it's up to 194 now and you clearly see the silver down here it's a silver it's gray powder the bottom of beaker go ahead and rinse all the lye and the sugar out of here get it to a filter and melt it up and see what kind of yield we got you I've allowed the silver to settle overnight and now what I'm going to do is go ahead and start rinsing the silver out before I do that though what I want to do is take care of this waste what I'm going to do is take these pieces of metal this is iron here and I'm gonna put them in my waste treatment bucket and then we're gonna put the waste down inside here so that it can be processed for proper disposal this is just copper in solution when I poured in that bucket the copper will cement out onto the iron forming complement and the iron will go into solution as you can see there's a little bit of silver chloride left in there I'll rinse that out and process that separately but it's very little less than a tenth of gram silver probably this is the silver chloride it came from the waste bucket what I'm gonna do is rinse it out to the waste bucket here and add it to my silver chloride jar that I save up and then when I get enough of it I process it into pure silver so I can run through my silver cell there's not very much silver chloride here as you can see but it's worth that what's going ahead and getting it out save it and you can see that the copper has already started to cement out onto the iron pieces that I had in there what I've got is I've got a bubbler that I stick in here and bubbling air through it to keep movement going stick the lid on my bubbler down down through the center hole we're stick it back up butter and meat buy a few hood that's how we get the copper out of solution and treat that waste now I'm gonna siphon off the Lyon sugar solution put on top of the silver I got a tube of water here stick my thumb over one end the other end and the solution I want to siphon and just let my thumb off I'm gonna do about three or four tees hot water benches this is tap water just knocked out more you we're trying to do is rinse all that lye off the silver we try to melt it as you can see the rinse water down there's very high in pH looks like it's up around 14 highly alkaline and then what we'll do here is take another reading on our rinsed silver jar here see how well we rinsed it out and that's going to be down around between 8 and 9 so we're getting there I'm gonna cite from the water off of this silver and I will go ahead and get it into a filter if we can get it melted now I'll get our silver into a filter so we can melt it into a button it's what the cement silver looks like it's pure silver metal powder well I underestimated the amount of silver I had in the beaker there so I'm gonna have to get that into another filter paper in the meantime I'm gonna put this into a melt dish and I'll have to run another filter paper for the rest of the sole I'll get the rest of the silver into this next filter paper and then we'll get it to melt dish melt it up and see what kind of a volume of silver we got out of these brazing sticks hey I've got the rest of the silver and a funnel here and a filter paper go ahead and add it just first batch here into the melt dish put some fire on it melt it up into a butt and see what we got before I start to melt I just wanted to review here this is the waste bucket a little bit of the silver got carried over during those rinses I'll let that settle out siphon off the waste and I recovered a little bit of silver and there be tenths only not very much but enough to be covered and up here we've got this residual amount that was left over when we tried to dissolve everything I'd like to be quit going with that because it was using up an excessive amount of nitric acid then I also I had the silver chloride from the silver chloride rinses that I recovered the other feature there so those are gonna affect our yield most go ahead and get the melt started now I'm going to start with the map gas torch and then I'll map gas and the elbow cylinder there and then I'll add the oxy-acetylene once we get going here you I've got the button here sitting on low heat what we're gonna do now is have a little bit of concentrated sulfuric acid to this just a couple of ml and what that'll do is that'll clean the button up nicely make it nice and shiny get all that flux off of there here's our button the pure silver probably close to 99% pure came out looking pretty good go ahead and throw it on a scale here and see what kind of weight we got you have forty five point two grams of 99% pure silver just under one point five troy ounces well that was definitely a little more challenging than I expected expected to have that thing done in one day as you can see in the video it took a leader of nitric acid to get all that metal go in solution the yield was 45 grams I was expecting what 63 grams I calculated expecting just over two troy ounces and yielded just under one point five troy ounces but we did get the silver out keep in mind now I was not trying to profit make a profit finding this silver what I'm trying to do here is show the process how the silver can be extracted out of that brazing rod and I think I did a pretty good job at that so this will conclude the extraction of the silver from the silver brazing rod hope you learned something I checked my comments every day so if you have any questions or comments that you'd like to leave leave those for the video and I'll to answer the questions the best that I can thanks for watching

Channel: sreetips

Views: 40,203

Keywords: welding acetylene oxy chloride

Id: Tu00RAHouQs

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018