Thanks so much for taking the time to do this video. I’ve been inspired by it. I’ve actually been having a go at this, but with my own little twist on things. I’ve been using a large stainless steel bowl as the cathode and a glass microwave plate to separate the cathode from anode. I then loaded up the glass plate with about 2kg SP items and then connected a 1.6v power supply to the circuit. It’s been chugging away nicely at 1.5 amps for the last few days now. I’ve strained so much of that yellow orange gunk…it’s not even funny 😁. The voltage is low, but I don’t really have time to be hands on, so I just leave it and check it periodically. Each day I take out the water to remove the sludge and see what’s cooking. I can definitely see lots of silver depositing all around the bowl, and on day 3 most of the items are partially about 80% stripped. It works slow, but it works well. The sludge goes into a container, and the water I put back in, topping it up with some extra salt solution. My plan is to use nitric acid to dissolve the silver I collect from the cathode and then precipitate it out with a table salt solution. Do you think it will work? Because I’ve tried dissolving some of the sludge in nitric, but nothing would precipitate from it. I’m thinking there probably isn’t enough Silver in the sludge to make the precipitation viable at this stage. Anyway. Thanks very much for taking the time to do your videos. I’m very new to scrapping, and your videos have helped me a lot!
100% correct on the silver % that's proven by putting the silver plate recovery into nitric acid always a blue colour appears which is a small % of base metals. Cool show mate.
Thank you for showing me how to do this. You’re a great communicator and teacher! I have so much to learn still. My question is....can you use the same method for plates and other silver plated items? I guess I just need to know what need to be in place to clean up a different shaped object. Glad these idle hands have an exciting project ahead since I can’t go to work:)
Yes you can use the method for hust about any silver plated item, however larger pieces are going to take alot longer. Trays or lager items that I can't cut into smaller pieces I tend to just sand them to remove the silver. Thanks for watching!
Very educational!! I watched alot of the educational ones before I started at the bottom (your oldest to newest) to be able to see every video. Now I'm going through alot of mail call vids. It's pretty cool to get to know alot of your fans thru mail call!!
I rinse the silver slugs in weak hydrochloric acid (drain cleaner) a few hours and most of the copper, nickel & zinc will go into the solution. it's not 999 but it's more pure.
I know this is from a while back, but I just got the notification!! For the life of me I can't figure out why I am just now being notified about a comment made 4 months ago! Thanks for watching!!
Don't know if it would work with ore, normally with that you have to dissolve the silver, or smelt it out like you did. With the plated stuff you are attacking the metal under the plating, not the silver itself.
I have been enjoying your videos.. In this Silver stripping cell.... What was the power supply ? The voltage and AMP's ? Will a battery charger suffice ?
I actually do this but around the gold first. I will inquart my gold scrap jewelry with silver and use nitric to disolve all basemetals, almost pure gold is left over. Now the nitric will still be active and i put sterling in a beaker and add the nitric which already has silver in solution from the gold. Then i will just add copper when no more silver will disolve, and cement out silver on the copper.
That is a good way to use up all your nitric and not waste any. I do my best to do the same when working on my own materials because I can just keep using the solution until it is completely saturated. Unfortunately when doing job refines you can't do that because every must be kept separated so the return will be accurate. So it actually cost me more to do a "Job Refine" then it does to do mine own stuff.
I got this method to work using a power box for an old xbox. It converts your wall current to DC which is why I chose that source. If anyone wants to use this as well the wiring is RED to RED BLACK, BLACK, WHITE TO BLACK
I’ve got about 200lbs of small silver plated screws. Size - 1/4” Long and about 1/8” thick. Would this process work for them? I was thinking a stainless screen ladle for anode and just running them a ladle at a time. Any input would be extremely helpful! Also would be my first attempt at a water.
nice trick. i just did a strip me a heavy in silver plate ice bucket. and i do have that orange sludge. and with what i had left of the salt water is more like a acid now. so i did a test with some gold plated 80's comp gold and laptop gold wifi/tv tuner and gps board that fitted into old mini pci for laptop. and boy did it strip the gold plate and it left the copper alone my v/a where 6V 3.6A. just a note use rubber gloves unlike my i have green fingers from the copper
The pickle pot is just a beaker of Sparex, sparex is a brand name. Pickle pots are used to remove fire scale, borax, ect., form your jewelry, casted items that have been fire scaled by the heat, IE turned dark and cruddy looking. Some use a very light Hcl mix for this, or other light acid mixes. Mostly Jewelers use Sparex and as I am an X jeweler I have just always used it. Hope this answered your question.
@@BackyardScrapping have used vinegar and water in the past but I’ve been using citric acid and water for years and it works really well for me. Can you use a use a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide to remove the copper from the silver after stripping it off the spoon?
Yes and it will get some of it, but not all. The only reason I didn't talk about that in the video is because I was showing people how they could recover the silver with out using any chemicals. But yes the HCL will clean it up which will make for a better yield in the long run. A simple test to see if there is copper in your silver is to take a small bit of it, put it in a test tube with 50/50 distilled water and at least 68 % nitric acid, if it turns any shade of blue there is copper in the silver. Pure silver will not turn any shade of blue in the 50/50 nitric acid solution, and I have yet to have that happen with the silver that I have stripped from silver plate. It may however be possible if you were to boil it in HCL for quite a while, I know that method is used to remove copper from PGM's so it would probably work with silver as well, but I know a simple wash won't completely do it, at least it has never worked for me. GREAT QUESTION Thanks!!
I tried this method with a piece of thin silver plated what seems to be tin base metal. I’m not sure. It started off great but then it begin completely dissolving the base metal. Also it has a lot of growth on the stainless cathode. I’m assuming it’s the dissolved base metal but I have no clue. What went wrong? Can silver plated tin work in this process or is it just plated copper or brass pieces?Thanks
I actually have no idea as I have never done plated tin. In fact I have never even had a piece of plated tin, I guess it could be plating to the SS ???
I haven't done that yet, but it should work just as well. Have been researching the best ways to do larger pieces to avoid having to cut them up, but haven't settled on one yet. Have seen people try and do larger stuff in a bigger bath, but it didn't work out so well, I believe more power is needed for the larger stuff, but not sure how safe amping things up would be, so I am passing on that idea. If I come across an good way to do large stuff, I will for sure put a video up about it.
Hi just saw your video. You just popped up on my feed. Very interesting. May i ask what did you use for a power supply for your electricity? Thanks in advance. Will be checking out more of your videos👍😁 !!!
Hey there I am new to doing this and was wondering if you could tell me what the different colors of sediment or sludge are and also does any of the silver dissolve and what happens when you accidentally use pure silver. I've read that the silver doesn't dissolve yet if you touch it it certainly does
I would assume you could, I do know that just what they call " Nickel Silver " has no silver, but I think what you are talking about is silver plating over nickel silver, so it should work.
Man without vacuum assistance that filtration is gonna take way longer than it needs.. easier, quicker, and more effective way is take a regular funnel and shove a cotton ball down into the neck... Not jammed tight but fairly firmly... The liquid will wick down the cotton fibers instead of tring to drip through porous filter paper... The fibers of course will catch the solids... I use this to filter silver chloride out of gold bearing solution and some og that AgCl particulate less than 10micron, may as well be colloidal... My filtrate comes out crystal clear and clean... Just a suggestion.... Good vid, you explain things well. Thank you
Thanks, I do use filter plugs, probably would have been a good idea to do both in this video, but my cluttered brain just didn't think about it. Mainly I was just trying to show that this can be done with simple stuff most have laying around, and that it doesn't take expensive scientific tools to recover PM's, just a little time & work. Thanks for watching & commenting!!
@@BackyardScrappingfor the most part i keep the exact same mentality. I do ewaste processing mostly but will jump on any dental or jewelry scrap deals that i occasionally find. I try to build most of my equipment myself... Smelter, electric hotplates, high current power supplies from microwave xformers, vacuum pump from a cheap portable tire inflator. Most of my glassware i use stuff like the older pyrex flameware (aluminasilicate). I do my best to source my chemicals locally. Its pretty uncommon that i have to order an odd piece of lab glass or an oddball unusual chemical. Your content seems like its my kinda style 😎 thank you!
@@idontknowmyfirstname69 Thanks so much!! lol back in the day all I had was canning jars and coffee pots & two 600ml beakers that I got for using as pickle pots when I did jewelry repair. Much of my "lab glass" has been donated, I have purchased some stuff, that I must admit makes life easier when making videos, but keeping it simple has always been my goal. Many people are very interested in this hobby, but think it requires expensive equipment and everything that goes along with that, and shy away for that reason. Hopefully the way I do things shows that there are ways to do things with out all that hype. A GREAT asset to this community (as far as I am concerned) is 999 Dusan, who shows that a lot of things can be accomplished with a little common sense, safety, and the ability to adapt to what you have on hand. Thanks again for watching!!
@@BackyardScrapping i agree completely. Yes you're definitely right about dusan... Im in a fb group hes an admin in... I had a couple of false starts getting into this over the last 23 or so years. There wasn't a lot of good information around early on. Hokes book but to someone new with no frame of reference it might as well be written in Sanskrit lol. Bout 6 or 7 years ago i was able to devote more time and money into learning. Followed a couple youtube vids from at the time a popular channel, info was bad.... Cost me more money than i will admit. I got rid of the internet and put my chin down and barrelled through figuring this stuff out on my own. It wasn't cheap, i messed up a lot, but it gave me novel experience and perspective compared to others. I found dusan's content after id figured out the basics but his videos definitely expanded my skill set and knowledge. I think one of the best things about his channel is he still shows stuff when something goes wrong or doesn't work or has an accident... Gives new people a better idea what to expect when learning. Hey im glad i found your channel, i dont spend a lot of time here so finding new stuff is uncommon for me. It was good meeting ya and talkin shop. Take care
Hello Dean. My son and I are wanting to do this as an experiment. We got a bundle of old cutlery from a charity shop for a few pounds. We also have a bundle of circuit breaker parts and large power connectors that are silver plated. Some of the cutlery is electroplated nickel silver. We are wondering if this means there is a silver plating over a copper/nickel core? and can it still be reverse electroplated to recover the thin silver plating? We are hoping to use the reverse electrolosis method to recover the silver plus some contaminates and then go on to use the nitric acid and other chemicals method to refine it. That way we only use a small amount of the harsh chemicals. That is our rough plan. Thanks. Rob
Sorry to say the nickel silver has no silver in or on it. I guess they called it that back in the day to make it sound more expensive. Best of luck with the rest, sounds like a great project fore you & you son!!
@@BackyardScrapping Hi. I know the nickel silver itself has no silver in it but the EPNS (electro plated nickel silver) is, from its name, still electroplated presumably with silver..... Otherwise it would be just called nicket silver and not be electroplated at all.?
I saw an illustrated video of copper electrolysis using 2 copper electrodes and you end up with pure copper on one electrode and precious metals sediments e.g. gold, platinum, paladium and silver as byproducts of copper electrolysis. Sreetips got them all, gold, silver, platinum and Palladian from his slimes from his silver cell. Just thought it might be worth looking into. Loved the video anyway , thanks for the tips.
Thanks, you have made a good point, many precious metals contain trace contaminates of of other precious metals, and over time they build up, especially in the silver cell. Another thing that many do not know about is that quite a bit of the "OLD" plated flatware and also .925 contain a tiny amount of gold. This is why you always save your filters from your projects. No matter how good you are at refining, you never get everything, and in the end the filters just add up to more precious metals.
Most of the time you have to sell it privately, person to person, or to a jeweler, scrapper, or directly to a refinery if possible. Most retail PM companies (Provident Metals, JM Bullion, etc.) will not buy your recovered metals in any form.
each item should only need about 8 to 10 mins., to loosen the silver, scraping it off takes a while. Sorry for the delay in answering, had surgery recently and have been down and out.
I still like using my small glass one just so I can sit and watch the crystals grow, its an amazing thing to watch. Good luck with your project, I hope all turns out well for you!!
A pickle pot is a jar or beaker with a light solution of acid or sparex to remove the borax from the metal. Explaining how the copper is removed, could take hours, go back and check out any of my silver refining videos, it is all explained there.
I'm just not sure, the one I use for this is bolted under my desk and I cant see the spec panel. I'm pretty sure most computer power supplies are close to the same, you could probably look online for specs and get an idea about what they are. I do know when I use the low volt wires for the silver cell, it is close to 3 amps, but not sure what the 12 volt wires run.
I have pretty much given up on internet yield info, it seems each site has its own "different yield" amounts, and I have found that most are way off base. I now just average my own experiences and get an idea that way. You're for sure right about things varying, you just really don't know what you're gonna get till the job is done. Thanks for watching!
@@BackyardScrapping Anyway i use the same method,only on a slightly larger scale as you. I have almost 3 1lb cans(packed) with wash and dried silver plate material that i will be taking to a metallurgist/refiner in Milwaukee as soon as i top off the 3rd can. should be interesting to see how much silver i get. btw i will be watching him refine and melt it down as well so i can do that process as well. catch ya on the flip side with results.
I know this is from a while back, but I just got the notification!! For the life of me I can't figure out why I am just now being notified about a comment made 4 months ago! This is my hobby, I do not do it to make money, I do it for the metal. You never know what you are going to recover so that's a tuff one to answer. 2 identical spoons will yield different amounts there are just to many variables, who was running the plating machine when they were being made, how more was this one used compared to that one, and the list goes on and on. Scrapping for me is a hobby, like prospecting, some times you get lucky and find something you do well on, but I have never made enough to be paid for the time it takes to do it, thats why its a hobby, I am happy just keeping the gold and silver out of the landfill. Hope this helped to explain things.
I'm sure the same method will work, if they are very small pieces you may have to resort to sulfuric nitric acid method, check this video out: ua-cam.com/video/YwQdB5HXph8/v-deo.html
Could you put the spoons into a flat roller before you de-plate them to make scraping them easier? I often see piles of silver plated spoons and forks on a shelf at the Good will store, but I never see a price on them. What should I buy them for If I choose to get them?
I don't see why you couldn't do that, it would give a larger surface area though, not necessarily a good thing if your using a small container or jar. Asa far as buying silver plate, I don't pay more then a $1.50 a pound for it. Its allot of work for a little return.
probably right, but nothing gets wasted, I save most all my scrap for "re-do's" So one day if I run out of stuff to process I have plenty to do, LOL. So even if I don't get it all, I haven't thrown it away 😜
I understand you are not doing this for a profit, but collecting all of the equipment and getting lots of silverplate for free or super cheap and waiting might be a good idea. When the suppression of silver prices finally ends, the price might go to $300 or even $1000 per ounce- then we can all get started!
I have a good stack of it now, and never pass it up if its worth the price, you're very right about saving it up! Back in the day, I wish I had done the same with computer scrap, but back then when gold was between two and three hundred a ounce, it just didn't seem worth the trouble. I get kind of sick when I think about how many Pentium pros just went to the dump! Had I taken just them and nothing else out of the computers I would have a pretty good stack of them now, who knew they would go from being worth a couple dollars worth of gold to over twenty! Its kinda like "laptop" boards today, LOL I don't do much more then pull the BGA chips off them cause there just isn't much else on them, BUT, I know there is still some PM's there, so I keep them anyway. Guess its just the old saying, "Hind Sight Is 20/20". Lol guess we always learn from our mistakes, but sometimes its just to late!! Thanks for watching!!
I know this video is almost a year old, but why melt it like it is? Why not dissolve it in nitric and then drop the silver using copper? It would be a lot pure-er that way.
Mainly for the video so I could show and explain the yield. Also melting it before a refine also does away with some impurities and makes for a cleaner drop when you do end up refining it. But I mainly did it for the video.
I take it you're using 12-volt current (an auto battery charger maybe?), and at the current fine silver spot price of $24.15, you did all that for less than $1.50 net. (2g divided by 31.1g = .0643 troy oz, and after deducting for impurities maybe .058 of an ounce = $1.40 of net silver value, BEFORE the refiner takes their cut. And I would not send it to a refiner unless you have a hundred or more pounds... I've got to believe to make this remotely worthwhile, you need to use a bigger container and string 20 to 40+ pieces of flatware to do at once.
The object of the video was to show how its done, not make a profit on what it recovered. Also this is a hobby, not a job for profit, I have said this many times in many videos. I know a lot of people that play golf as a hobby and spend many hours and hundreds of dollars just to sweat their buts off in August knocking a little ball around a field not making a dime. At least I made a dollar forty sitting in an air conditioned room & it only cost me a dimes worth of salt. I don't look for fault or reasons why people do what they do for their hobbies, it is completely up to "Me, You, & Them" what is done with our own time. The cell was powered by a power supply from a scrap computer. In fact the only thing in the whole project that cost anything was the alligator clips which I had laying around for years, the 3 coffee filters, and the salt, so I would say after that I still walked with a dollar off the 5 spoons. Thanks for watching.
@@BackyardScrapping Hi, not sure you can compare golf or any sport being played as a "hobby" with doing what you show here because any sport has a challenging aspect involved in doing it. Same with playing a musical instrument or any number of relaxing pastimes. But there is no challenge involved in stripping plated silver,... unless you count trying to make a profit at a reasonable hourly wage. (sorry, a little humor there :-) I will admit there is a "green" side in recycling though, and as silver is used in so many industrial products, it will always be useful and needed. As a 35-year bench jewelry repairman and diamond setter (now retired from that field), and having a few times refined gold using acids and precipitating it later, I hadn't known of this method for silver recovery previously. One thing I found out within about 3 minutes is, DO NOT TRY to scale up in the surface area to make it more economically feasible using generally available rectifiers, as I did a few days ago using an old car battery charger. (25 years old maybe, but working perfectly up till then) I used a much larger stainless steel cathode (negative side), using a pie serving piece of flatware. The anode (+ SIDE) was clipped to 3 silver plated butter knives that I used electrical tape on the blades to hold them together and splayed out the handles in the saltwater.I was getting an active reaction, but after a few minutes the old battery charger started to smoke! The silver-plated pieces were "1847 Rogers Bros. Warranted 16 DWT" Silver Plated 9” Butterknives. Initially, I thought the "16 DWT" designation referred to the amount of pure silver on EACH piece, but later found an online statement that was "Warranted 16 DWT" marked on each piece (or 8/10 of a Troy Ounce) meant that amount of silver was used to cover over a DOZEN flatware pieces, so not nearly as heavily plated as I thought! (only about 1.33 DWT of actual silver was deposited on each piece,... and a bit deceptive in my view, to mark the pieces in this way! 😞 Although the silver on the handles looked stripped by the time I had to turn off the charger, all I had in solution was a brown color in the water, with no physical flakes or pealed-off sections to speak of. These knives are also magnetic and probably Iron underneath, unlike the Copper Nickle bases of the forks and spoons, so not sure if that screwed up the expected reaction? The stripped knife handles also had lots of rust showing the next morning from the saltwater exposure the day before, so they're definitely an Iron alloy or mild steel. Anyway, scaling up to do 3 items to strip at once, and a bigger SS cathode didn't work out so well! 🙂
@@josephtousignant7318 Not having tried scaling up much more then a bit bigger jar, it sounds like it will take more power to use a larger volume of electrolyte (saltwater) & lager anodes and cathodes . As I know just enough about electricity to get my self in trouble, I don't know at what point it would become "Unsafe" I know that DC if safer then AC, but I also know its the amps that kill ya, not the volts, so I'm assuming that DC pushed with more amps would also become dangerous at some point. Not knowing that point, I would say this is a "small scale" operation, and just for hobbyist recoveries. I am a retired Gold/Silver smith & Lapidary, nice to hear from someone in the same occupation, I know there are not to many of us left in our new disposable world, soon we will go the way of the "Cobbler" & "Watch Maker" which are now days nearly or completely extinct. It was actually turning in my first batch of sweeps that got me into recovery & refining. I kept my buffs sweeps etc., for many years, and after sending them off and receiving next to nothing back after this fee and that fee I figured it best for me to learn how to do it, which proved to be the right thing to do! I got more out of my 1st refine, which was only 2 years of sweeps, then the previous 10 years I had saved up and sent off. I think now days they have become a bit more reputable as knowledge about this subject has become more available, but as far as I am concerned they are still paying much less then they should be. In any case should you experiment further with this recovery method I would like to hear the results, one thing I have learned in life is, 2 heads are better then one, whether they agree or not, and if not the second head still gives perspective! Take care, and thanks so much for watching!!🙂
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this video. I’ve been inspired by it.
I’ve actually been having a go at this, but with my own little twist on things.
I’ve been using a large stainless steel bowl as the cathode and a glass microwave plate to separate the cathode from anode.
I then loaded up the glass plate with about 2kg SP items and then connected a 1.6v power supply to the circuit. It’s been chugging away nicely at 1.5 amps for the last few days now. I’ve strained so much of that yellow orange gunk…it’s not even funny 😁. The voltage is low, but I don’t really have time to be hands on, so I just leave it and check it periodically.
Each day I take out the water to remove the sludge and see what’s cooking. I can definitely see lots of silver depositing all around the bowl, and on day 3 most of the items are partially about 80% stripped. It works slow, but it works well. The sludge goes into a container, and the water I put back in, topping it up with some extra salt solution.
My plan is to use nitric acid to dissolve the silver I collect from the cathode and then precipitate it out with a table salt solution.
Do you think it will work?
Because I’ve tried dissolving some of the sludge in nitric, but nothing would precipitate from it. I’m thinking there probably isn’t enough Silver in the sludge to make the precipitation viable at this stage.
Anyway. Thanks very much for taking the time to do your videos. I’m very new to scrapping, and your videos have helped me a lot!
Always enjoy your videos! Thank you!
100% correct on the silver % that's proven by putting the silver plate recovery into nitric acid always a blue colour appears which is a small % of base metals. Cool show mate.
Thanks so much!
I am from INDIA .I want learn metal refine and ricovery. you very good teacher. Really.
Thank You!! I just do what I do 😁
Thank you for showing me how to do this. You’re a great communicator and teacher! I have so much to learn still. My question is....can you use the same method for plates and other silver plated items? I guess I just need to know what need to be in place to clean up a different shaped object.
Glad these idle hands have an exciting project ahead since I can’t go to work:)
Yes you can use the method for hust about any silver plated item, however larger pieces are going to take alot longer. Trays or lager items that I can't cut into smaller pieces I tend to just sand them to remove the silver. Thanks for watching!
Very educational!! I watched alot of the educational ones before I started at the bottom (your oldest to newest) to be able to see every video. Now I'm going through alot of mail call vids. It's pretty cool to get to know alot of your fans thru mail call!!
Thanks for taking the time to watch everything! You must have the patience of a saint!!!
I like watching your videos. thanks, I have used the salt water stripping method I think it works well.
Thanks so much for watching & commenting!!
Great info Backyard Scrapping enjoyed it very much my friend.👍👍
Thanks Willy glad you liked it!
I rinse the silver slugs in weak hydrochloric acid (drain cleaner) a few hours and most of the copper, nickel & zinc will go into the solution. it's not 999 but it's more pure.
Great idea for those who don't fool around with nitric!! Thanks for the input 👍👍👍
Dino, you explain the process so well. Thanks helping me understand what all you go through. All the Best ~ Shirl
Thanks shirl, and as always thanks for watching!
So he just Hooks 2 wires up ? What's the wires connected to? He left out so much information. I don't see how yall think this was so informative
Good stuff my friend. There was more silver than I would have thought 👍
Not to bad, more then anything it just depends what your starting with.
@@BackyardScrapping Thanks a lot dear
Awesome video thanks pretty cool and some knowledge I appreciate it
I know this is from a while back, but I just got the notification!! For the life of me I can't figure out why I am just now being notified about a comment made 4 months ago! Thanks for watching!!
Wow that easy really cool just salt water hmmmm wonder what ore would look like but silver ware im on it now thank you sir
Don't know if it would work with ore, normally with that you have to dissolve the silver, or smelt it out like you did. With the plated stuff you are attacking the metal under the plating, not the silver itself.
First time seeing your video and I have to say very well done and explaining the process was great. You just got a new subscriber.
Thanks so much, glad you liked it!
Love ya vids big help was wondering would this work for gold plated ?
Thanks! Great info
I have been enjoying your videos..
In this Silver stripping cell....
What was the power supply ?
The voltage and AMP's ?
Will a battery charger suffice ?
12 volts, and yes a battery charger will work just fine.
I actually do this but around the gold first. I will inquart my gold scrap jewelry with silver and use nitric to disolve all basemetals, almost pure gold is left over. Now the nitric will still be active and i put sterling in a beaker and add the nitric which already has silver in solution from the gold. Then i will just add copper when no more silver will disolve, and cement out silver on the copper.
That is a good way to use up all your nitric and not waste any. I do my best to do the same when working on my own materials because I can just keep using the solution until it is completely saturated. Unfortunately when doing job refines you can't do that because every must be kept separated so the return will be accurate. So it actually cost me more to do a "Job Refine" then it does to do mine own stuff.
I got this method to work using a power box for an old xbox. It converts your wall current to DC which is why I chose that source.
If anyone wants to use this as well the wiring is
RED to RED
BLACK, BLACK, WHITE TO BLACK
Cool, glad that worked!! 👍
Another awesome video my friend very cool, i love watching you do your magic. Thanks for the video BYS!
Thanks so much Todd
That was very cool. I know what I'm doing this spring. Thanks for sharing.
YW
I’ve got about 200lbs of small silver plated screws. Size - 1/4” Long and about 1/8” thick. Would this process work for them? I was thinking a stainless screen ladle for anode and just running them a ladle at a time. Any input would be extremely helpful! Also would be my first attempt at a water.
Awesome work.
Thanks
Pretty cool brother thanks for sharing.
Thanks man YW!
Very informative. Thanks for sharing and take care.
YW
Thank you for making these videos! What is the power source used in the jar?
Its an old computer power supply, thanks for watching!!!
Can’t you wash filtered material with HCL to dissolve impurities to refine silver further?
yes, it will for sure help, but from my experiences your still not going to be at .999
nice trick. i just did a strip me a heavy in silver plate ice bucket. and i do have that orange sludge.
and with what i had left of the salt water is more like a acid now. so i did a test with some gold plated 80's comp gold and laptop gold wifi/tv tuner and gps board that fitted into old mini pci for laptop. and boy did it strip the gold plate and it left the copper alone my v/a where 6V 3.6A. just a note use rubber gloves unlike my i have green fingers from the copper
Will this excessively pit the base metal if I wanted to use this method to remove old plating in order to prep for replating?
Probably not gonna be the best for re-plating. It could work, but you will need to keep a VERY close eye on things!
What V &A do you need to de-plate or are there no specifics?
In the video I used the 12 vold lines out of an old pc power supply, don't know what the amps were.
Great thanks for the info. Do you think a car battery charger would work?
For sure it would, in fact that is what most use.@@shaunmcmanus2432
Could you explain the pickle pot? THANK YOU for being clear that it will not be pure silver, great video, love the low tech washing.
The pickle pot is just a beaker of Sparex, sparex is a brand name. Pickle pots are used to remove fire scale, borax, ect., form your jewelry, casted items that have been fire scaled by the heat, IE turned dark and cruddy looking. Some use a very light Hcl mix for this, or other light acid mixes. Mostly Jewelers use Sparex and as I am an X jeweler I have just always used it. Hope this answered your question.
Yes, this is alot easier and safer thanks
@@BackyardScrapping have used vinegar and water in the past but I’ve been using citric acid and water for years and it works really well for me.
Can you use a use a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide to remove the copper from the silver after stripping it off the spoon?
Will this work for removing tin plating on bar copper?
I don't know for sure as I have never tried to do that???
Have you tried washing that with hcl to clean out the copper?
Yes and it will get some of it, but not all. The only reason I didn't talk about that in the video is because I was showing people how they could recover the silver with out using any chemicals. But yes the HCL will clean it up which will make for a better yield in the long run. A simple test to see if there is copper in your silver is to take a small bit of it, put it in a test tube with 50/50 distilled water and at least 68 % nitric acid, if it turns any shade of blue there is copper in the silver. Pure silver will not turn any shade of blue in the 50/50 nitric acid solution, and I have yet to have that happen with the silver that I have stripped from silver plate. It may however be possible if you were to boil it in HCL for quite a while, I know that method is used to remove copper from PGM's so it would probably work with silver as well, but I know a simple wash won't completely do it, at least it has never worked for me. GREAT QUESTION Thanks!!
I tried this method with a piece of thin silver plated what seems to be tin base metal. I’m not sure. It started off great but then it begin completely dissolving the base metal. Also it has a lot of growth on the stainless cathode. I’m assuming it’s the dissolved base metal but I have no clue. What went wrong? Can silver plated tin work in this process or is it just plated copper or brass pieces?Thanks
I actually have no idea as I have never done plated tin. In fact I have never even had a piece of plated tin, I guess it could be plating to the SS ???
Good job of explaining the process. Do you also cut up a dish or tray and do the same thing?
I haven't done that yet, but it should work just as well. Have been researching the best ways to do larger pieces to avoid having to cut them up, but haven't settled on one yet. Have seen people try and do larger stuff in a bigger bath, but it didn't work out so well, I believe more power is needed for the larger stuff, but not sure how safe amping things up would be, so I am passing on that idea.
If I come across an good way to do large stuff, I will for sure put a video up about it.
Thank you, keep teaching me
You're Welcome!👍😁
Awesome video thanks for sharing I'm going to try it
Cool have fun!
that's fantastic how would you go about doing a large amount of this same type of material
Works best for smaller items. You can cut the larger stuff up. Don't recommend trying a large bath for trays etc., it doesn't work as well.
@@BackyardScrapping just consolidated what I have accumulated I have 6 full 55 gallon barrels+ part of another
@@stephenfarrington2337 Holy crapp, thats a BUNCH!!!!!!
@@choronzon Great info, thanks for the input!! 👍👍👍
@@BackyardScrapping Thought you would get a kick out of these pics
Hi just saw your video. You just popped up on my feed. Very interesting. May i ask what did you use for a power supply for your electricity? Thanks in advance. Will be checking out more of your videos👍😁 !!!
I used an old desktop computer power supply, you seen to do a little rewiring, but it works pretty good for this, and it didn't cost me anything 😄
Does using distilled water matter any?
Hey there I am new to doing this and was wondering if you could tell me what the different colors of sediment or sludge are and also does any of the silver dissolve and what happens when you accidentally use pure silver. I've read that the silver doesn't dissolve yet if you touch it it certainly does
Another good one!
Thanks
Can you use this method with ESPN silver plated items?
I would assume you could, I do know that just what they call " Nickel Silver " has no silver, but I think what you are talking about is silver plating over nickel silver, so it should work.
Man without vacuum assistance that filtration is gonna take way longer than it needs.. easier, quicker, and more effective way is take a regular funnel and shove a cotton ball down into the neck... Not jammed tight but fairly firmly... The liquid will wick down the cotton fibers instead of tring to drip through porous filter paper... The fibers of course will catch the solids... I use this to filter silver chloride out of gold bearing solution and some og that AgCl particulate less than 10micron, may as well be colloidal... My filtrate comes out crystal clear and clean... Just a suggestion.... Good vid, you explain things well. Thank you
Thanks, I do use filter plugs, probably would have been a good idea to do both in this video, but my cluttered brain just didn't think about it. Mainly I was just trying to show that this can be done with simple stuff most have laying around, and that it doesn't take expensive scientific tools to recover PM's, just a little time & work. Thanks for watching & commenting!!
@@BackyardScrappingfor the most part i keep the exact same mentality. I do ewaste processing mostly but will jump on any dental or jewelry scrap deals that i occasionally find. I try to build most of my equipment myself... Smelter, electric hotplates, high current power supplies from microwave xformers, vacuum pump from a cheap portable tire inflator. Most of my glassware i use stuff like the older pyrex flameware (aluminasilicate). I do my best to source my chemicals locally. Its pretty uncommon that i have to order an odd piece of lab glass or an oddball unusual chemical. Your content seems like its my kinda style 😎 thank you!
@@idontknowmyfirstname69 Thanks so much!! lol back in the day all I had was canning jars and coffee pots & two 600ml beakers that I got for using as pickle pots when I did jewelry repair. Much of my "lab glass" has been donated, I have purchased some stuff, that I must admit makes life easier when making videos, but keeping it simple has always been my goal. Many people are very interested in this hobby, but think it requires expensive equipment and everything that goes along with that, and shy away for that reason. Hopefully the way I do things shows that there are ways to do things with out all that hype. A GREAT asset to this community (as far as I am concerned) is 999 Dusan, who shows that a lot of things can be accomplished with a little common sense, safety, and the ability to adapt to what you have on hand. Thanks again for watching!!
@@BackyardScrapping i agree completely. Yes you're definitely right about dusan... Im in a fb group hes an admin in... I had a couple of false starts getting into this over the last 23 or so years. There wasn't a lot of good information around early on. Hokes book but to someone new with no frame of reference it might as well be written in Sanskrit lol. Bout 6 or 7 years ago i was able to devote more time and money into learning. Followed a couple youtube vids from at the time a popular channel, info was bad.... Cost me more money than i will admit. I got rid of the internet and put my chin down and barrelled through figuring this stuff out on my own. It wasn't cheap, i messed up a lot, but it gave me novel experience and perspective compared to others. I found dusan's content after id figured out the basics but his videos definitely expanded my skill set and knowledge. I think one of the best things about his channel is he still shows stuff when something goes wrong or doesn't work or has an accident... Gives new people a better idea what to expect when learning. Hey im glad i found your channel, i dont spend a lot of time here so finding new stuff is uncommon for me. It was good meeting ya and talkin shop. Take care
@@idontknowmyfirstname69 Glad you found it as well, I really enjoy chatting with like minded people! Take care!!😃
Is doing this not producing chlorine gas though?
Hello Dean.
My son and I are wanting to do this as an experiment. We got a bundle of old cutlery from a charity shop for a few pounds. We also have a bundle of circuit breaker parts and large power connectors that are silver plated. Some of the cutlery is electroplated nickel silver. We are wondering if this means there is a silver plating over a copper/nickel core? and can it still be reverse electroplated to recover the thin silver plating?
We are hoping to use the reverse electrolosis method to recover the silver plus some contaminates and then go on to use the nitric acid and other chemicals method to refine it. That way we only use a small amount of the harsh chemicals. That is our rough plan.
Thanks. Rob
Sorry to say the nickel silver has no silver in or on it. I guess they called it that back in the day to make it sound more expensive. Best of luck with the rest, sounds like a great project fore you & you son!!
@@BackyardScrapping Hi. I know the nickel silver itself has no silver in it but the EPNS (electro plated nickel silver) is, from its name, still electroplated presumably with silver..... Otherwise it would be just called nicket silver and not be electroplated at all.?
Awesome buddy
Thanks Man!
How would Sterling react to this process?
Thank you i loved it great tip mate
Thanks, & thanks for watching!
What was in your rectangular shape rinse bucket ??
Just water.
Thank you. Just wanted to be sure.
I saw an illustrated video of copper electrolysis using 2 copper electrodes and you end up with pure copper on one electrode and precious metals sediments e.g. gold, platinum, paladium and silver as byproducts of copper electrolysis. Sreetips got them all, gold, silver, platinum and Palladian from his slimes from his silver cell. Just thought it might be worth looking into. Loved the video anyway , thanks for the tips.
Thanks, you have made a good point, many precious metals contain trace contaminates of of other precious metals, and over time they build up, especially in the silver cell. Another thing that many do not know about is that quite a bit of the "OLD" plated flatware and also .925 contain a tiny amount of gold. This is why you always save your filters from your projects. No matter how good you are at refining, you never get everything, and in the end the filters just add up to more precious metals.
What is your pickle pot?
Sorry , I read the comments and got my answer lol.
Jewelers Sparex for cleaning fire scale
Thank you.
Y W 😀
How much voltage you are use sir ♥
Thank you
12
What do you do with the recovered silver?
Where can you sell it?
There are many places to sell it, many people trade metals at there local coin shops, you can also sell to refineries or other metal dealers.
@@BackyardScrapping Thanks! :)
@@neesiedavis4062 Your welcome!
Very cool
Thanks
What is the yellowish stuff that comes off
Probably base metals, brass etc..
Hi, thanks for this easy and fast way
Question: Can this extracted silver be sold, i.e. acceptable in the market?
Thanks again
Most of the time you have to sell it privately, person to person, or to a jeweler, scrapper, or directly to a refinery if possible. Most retail PM companies (Provident Metals, JM Bullion, etc.) will not buy your recovered metals in any form.
What do you use for your electricity?
Ok got the info reading back thanks for your video
An old computer power supply.
I'm sorry but how long each piece take? And how do I know when it's done? I'm currently doing it right now
each item should only need about 8 to 10 mins., to loosen the silver, scraping it off takes a while. Sorry for the delay in answering, had surgery recently and have been down and out.
Is the salt filter out with the water
possible if some of it recrystallizes, but otherwise I doubt it.
Hi
Can use carbon road instead of stables steel
I have never used one, but I suppose its possible.
Im going to start an electrolytic silver cell for pure silver crystal, next summer.
I still like using my small glass one just so I can sit and watch the crystals grow, its an amazing thing to watch. Good luck with your project, I hope all turns out well for you!!
What exactly is a pickle pot!? How do you get the copper out to make it pure?
A pickle pot is a jar or beaker with a light solution of acid or sparex to remove the borax from the metal. Explaining how the copper is removed, could take hours, go back and check out any of my silver refining videos, it is all explained there.
Nitric acid
What's the amp on your charger I no it's 12 volts
I'm just not sure, the one I use for this is bolted under my desk and I cant see the spec panel. I'm pretty sure most computer power supplies are close to the same, you could probably look online for specs and get an idea about what they are. I do know when I use the low volt wires for the silver cell, it is close to 3 amps, but not sure what the 12 volt wires run.
I read somewhere there is 1 ounce of silver per 144 forks. I imagine results may vary if the item is double,triple or quadruple plated.
I have pretty much given up on internet yield info, it seems each site has its own "different yield" amounts, and I have found that most are way off base. I now just average my own experiences and get an idea that way. You're for sure right about things varying, you just really don't know what you're gonna get till the job is done. Thanks for watching!
@@BackyardScrapping Anyway i use the same method,only on a slightly larger scale as you. I have almost 3 1lb cans(packed) with wash and dried silver plate material that i will be taking to a metallurgist/refiner in Milwaukee as soon as i top off the 3rd can. should be interesting to see how much silver i get. btw i will be watching him refine and melt it down as well so i can do that process as well. catch ya on the flip side with results.
@@bantalee2002 sounds good, let me know how it goes!
are you just running 12 volts or higher? I never caught that in the video
Just 12 volts, I have never tried higher then that.
Do you or have you made money and roughly how much gave you got back in weight
I know this is from a while back, but I just got the notification!! For the life of me I can't figure out why I am just now being notified about a comment made 4 months ago!
This is my hobby, I do not do it to make money, I do it for the metal. You never know what you are going to recover so that's a tuff one to answer. 2 identical spoons will yield different amounts there are just to many variables, who was running the plating machine when they were being made, how more was this one used compared to that one, and the list goes on and on. Scrapping for me is a hobby, like prospecting, some times you get lucky and find something you do well on, but I have never made enough to be paid for the time it takes to do it, thats why its a hobby, I am happy just keeping the gold and silver out of the landfill. Hope this helped to explain things.
How do u remove silver off smaller pieces ?
I'm sure the same method will work, if they are very small pieces you may have to resort to sulfuric nitric acid method, check this video out: ua-cam.com/video/YwQdB5HXph8/v-deo.html
Could you put the spoons into a flat roller before you de-plate them to make scraping them easier?
I often see piles of silver plated spoons and forks on a shelf at the Good will store, but I never see a price on them. What should I buy them for If I choose to get them?
I don't see why you couldn't do that, it would give a larger surface area though, not necessarily a good thing if your using a small container or jar. Asa far as buying silver plate, I don't pay more then a $1.50 a pound for it. Its allot of work for a little return.
Probably would've been 2 full grams if you'd completely removed the silver from the last one. This is cool. Thanks.
probably right, but nothing gets wasted, I save most all my scrap for "re-do's" So one day if I run out of stuff to process I have plenty to do, LOL. So even if I don't get it all, I haven't thrown it away 😜
I understand you are not doing this for a profit, but collecting all of the equipment and getting lots of silverplate for free or super cheap and waiting might be a good idea. When the suppression of silver prices finally ends, the price might go to $300 or even $1000 per ounce- then we can all get started!
I have a good stack of it now, and never pass it up if its worth the price, you're very right about saving it up! Back in the day, I wish I had done the same with computer scrap, but back then when gold was between two and three hundred a ounce, it just didn't seem worth the trouble. I get kind of sick when I think about how many Pentium pros just went to the dump! Had I taken just them and nothing else out of the computers I would have a pretty good stack of them now, who knew they would go from being worth a couple dollars worth of gold to over twenty! Its kinda like "laptop" boards today, LOL I don't do much more then pull the BGA chips off them cause there just isn't much else on them, BUT, I know there is still some PM's there, so I keep them anyway. Guess its just the old saying, "Hind Sight Is 20/20". Lol guess we always learn from our mistakes, but sometimes its just to late!! Thanks for watching!!
First like, first comment.
Thanks Man!
I’m a licensed chemist and your are right, you will have other metals in it.
Thanks for the backup! 😁😁😁
The only way youll get that pure is borax in the melt. Well unless you use acids to disolve it
👍
I know this video is almost a year old, but why melt it like it is? Why not dissolve it in nitric and then drop the silver using copper? It would be a lot pure-er that way.
Mainly for the video so I could show and explain the yield. Also melting it before a refine also does away with some impurities and makes for a cleaner drop when you do end up refining it. But I mainly did it for the video.
What does it mean to “drop” the silver using copper?
@@Nimue32Watch a SREETIPS video on silver precipitation using copper. He fully explains the chemical process over and over again.
1 never use tap water it has chorine Florida and green slime !
We're lucky, we have are own well ! 😄
You are very very very good sit for hours on your program
Thanks so much, really glad you're enjoying it!!
I take it you're using 12-volt current (an auto battery charger maybe?), and at the current fine silver spot price of $24.15, you did all that for less than $1.50 net. (2g divided by 31.1g = .0643 troy oz, and after deducting for impurities maybe .058 of an ounce = $1.40 of net silver value, BEFORE the refiner takes their cut. And I would not send it to a refiner unless you have a hundred or more pounds...
I've got to believe to make this remotely worthwhile, you need to use a bigger container and string 20 to 40+ pieces of flatware to do at once.
The object of the video was to show how its done, not make a profit on what it recovered. Also this is a hobby, not a job for profit, I have said this many times in many videos. I know a lot of people that play golf as a hobby and spend many hours and hundreds of dollars just to sweat their buts off in August knocking a little ball around a field not making a dime. At least I made a dollar forty sitting in an air conditioned room & it only cost me a dimes worth of salt. I don't look for fault or reasons why people do what they do for their hobbies, it is completely up to "Me, You, & Them" what is done with our own time. The cell was powered by a power supply from a scrap computer. In fact the only thing in the whole project that cost anything was the alligator clips which I had laying around for years, the 3 coffee filters, and the salt, so I would say after that I still walked with a dollar off the 5 spoons. Thanks for watching.
@@BackyardScrapping Hi, not sure you can compare golf or any sport being played as a "hobby" with doing what you show here because any sport has a challenging aspect involved in doing it. Same with playing a musical instrument or any number of relaxing pastimes. But there is no challenge involved in stripping plated silver,... unless you count trying to make a profit at a reasonable hourly wage. (sorry, a little humor there :-)
I will admit there is a "green" side in recycling though, and as silver is used in so many industrial products, it will always be useful and needed. As a 35-year bench jewelry repairman and diamond setter (now retired from that field), and having a few times refined gold using acids and precipitating it later, I hadn't known of this method for silver recovery previously.
One thing I found out within about 3 minutes is, DO NOT TRY to scale up in the surface area to make it more economically feasible using generally available rectifiers, as I did a few days ago using an old car battery charger. (25 years old maybe, but working perfectly up till then)
I used a much larger stainless steel cathode (negative side), using a pie serving piece of flatware. The anode (+ SIDE) was clipped to 3 silver plated butter knives that I used electrical tape on the blades to hold them together and splayed out the handles in the saltwater.I was getting an active reaction, but after a few minutes the old battery charger started to smoke!
The silver-plated pieces were "1847 Rogers Bros. Warranted 16 DWT" Silver Plated 9” Butterknives. Initially, I thought the "16 DWT" designation referred to the amount of pure silver on EACH piece, but later found an online statement that was "Warranted 16 DWT" marked on each piece (or 8/10 of a Troy Ounce) meant that amount of silver was used to cover over a DOZEN flatware pieces, so not nearly as heavily plated as I thought! (only about 1.33 DWT of actual silver was deposited on each piece,... and a bit deceptive in my view, to mark the pieces in this way! 😞
Although the silver on the handles looked stripped by the time I had to turn off the charger, all I had in solution was a brown color in the water, with no physical flakes or pealed-off sections to speak of. These knives are also magnetic and probably Iron underneath, unlike the Copper Nickle bases of the forks and spoons, so not sure if that screwed up the expected reaction? The stripped knife handles also had lots of rust showing the next morning from the saltwater exposure the day before, so they're definitely an Iron alloy or mild steel.
Anyway, scaling up to do 3 items to strip at once, and a bigger SS cathode didn't work out so well! 🙂
@@josephtousignant7318 Not having tried scaling up much more then a bit bigger jar, it sounds like it will take more power to use a larger volume of electrolyte (saltwater) & lager anodes and cathodes . As I know just enough about electricity to get my self in trouble, I don't know at what point it would become "Unsafe" I know that DC if safer then AC, but I also know its the amps that kill ya, not the volts, so I'm assuming that DC pushed with more amps would also become dangerous at some point. Not knowing that point, I would say this is a "small scale" operation, and just for hobbyist recoveries.
I am a retired Gold/Silver smith & Lapidary, nice to hear from someone in the same occupation, I know there are not to many of us left in our new disposable world, soon we will go the way of the "Cobbler" & "Watch Maker" which are now days nearly or completely extinct. It was actually turning in my first batch of sweeps that got me into recovery & refining. I kept my buffs sweeps etc., for many years, and after sending them off and receiving next to nothing back after this fee and that fee I figured it best for me to learn how to do it, which proved to be the right thing to do! I got more out of my 1st refine, which was only 2 years of sweeps, then the previous 10 years I had saved up and sent off. I think now days they have become a bit more reputable as knowledge about this subject has become more available, but as far as I am concerned they are still paying much less then they should be.
In any case should you experiment further with this recovery method I would like to hear the results, one thing I have learned in life is, 2 heads are better then one, whether they agree or not, and if not the second head still gives perspective! Take care, and thanks so much for watching!!🙂
1.80 we are rich😀
you'rre losing silver by not filtering from the jar into the bucket. there will be silver in the bucket. filter all of it including the orange gunk.
will do