My local thrift stores all have piles of old silverplate-no one wants it anymore, and no one wants to polish it,either. I'm always on the hunt for Sterling, and I've found that Sterling items are ALWAYS marked "Sterling" -especially things made in the US. If you are serious about finding Sterling "in the wild", you have to know foreign hallmarks also-they won't say "Sterling" on them, but maybe just a stamped ".925" or something similar. British hallmarks are more involved, but you are always looking for the lion with the raised paw. At every thrift store, I always go through all the silverplate and old silverware-I've found an amazing amount of overlooked Sterling. My most common find are "weighted Sterling" candleholders-I've found dozens of them in the past two years. They are all just a thin skin of silver around a heavy cement or plaster base, but it all adds up.
The little symbol A is a good guide as to the quality of the silver plate. There are tons of different systems and no standard but a century or so ago, many British makers used followed the gradings ... A1 = Superior, A = Standard and then lower and lower grades below that B, C, D, E based on how many pennyweight was plated on. A1 was usually a troy ounce of silver per 12 tablespoons or forks. Also don't get confused with stamped in Old English font which looks like a hallmark. That's electroplated nickel silver and usually pretty thin.
Your videos have gotten much better over the last several years........ This one is new to me, but important for me to learn how much effort I should put into plated vs. sterling pieces.... Thanks
Mr Sreetips there is a very easy way to de-plate silver. A tub of salt water with a piece of stainless steel for the negative contact and hook the positive contact to the piece of plated silver. Run a current through it for 10-15 min and the silver will flake off
If you undershoot a little bit with the HCl, so you leave just a little silver nitrate in solution. You can filter out your silver chloride, and save the filtrate. You can then use the filtrate to dissolve more silver items, because when you add the HCl you also create nitric acid. You just want to undershoot with the HCl, because if some is left over it will react with the silver and form a AgCl coating keeping the nitric from dissolving it. That way you can save some money on buying more nitric. I actually just did this, it worked out pretty well.
There is a much cheaper way of doing silver plate. The formula is 19 parts sulfuric acid to one part nitric acid. Heat but only to about 140 F. The silver plate will turn white as it dissolves in the solution. When the white is gone, that piece is done. I use three buckets and a plastic colander. I let one batch drain while the next batch is working in the solution. After a batch is drained, I rinse in bucket number one, still in the colander, then bucket number two, then dumped in an empty bucket. Buckets one and two have two gallons of tap water in them. When the solution is spent, it will be very dark and will not take any more silver. I let the solution cool down to ambient temperature. I pour half the solution in each of the water buckets and add a saturated solution of un-iodized saltwater to turn the silver into silver chloride. Work it into silver metal as you wish. You might want to try it in one of your great videos. You do a great job. I enjoy them very much.
Hi frank zahn, my name is Joshua. I processed some e-waste a decent amount of it for gold and I have a lot of the waist but I know there must be silver in. Personally, I think there’s a lot of silver, but I can’t figure out why it won’t precipitate. I don’t know if I neutralized the solution or not so I’m going to try that one more time, but can you give me any advice? I really need help on this because I could use the silver right now. Do you have the time please answer me back. Thank you.
@@sreetips hello sir, my name is Joshua. I asked the same question to the gentleman above. You seem like someone who is busy so I didn’t think to even ask you first. I processed some e-waste a while back, and the waste made a very deep, dark green solution. I know there’s a lot of silver in it but I can’t figure out how to precipitate it out. I have added hydrochloric acid to it. I’ve put copper in the solution hoping to cement it out. Can you please help me?
some companies call it Ultraplate, some call it Extraplate. I only found about it awhile back because my grandma had a bunch of it, than I started looking into it. It is very common, mostly older pieces but some newer ones can be found. Yes you can find several pieces with with very thin plating but thick plating isn't rare
Why? The junk silver is worth more than the silver you claim is pure. How can you prove that purity? I know the silver dime is 90% silver and I have a good idea of its weight and value.
@@allenjester3228 not when you call it just. Its worth less. Our testing things as humans have evolved over time. It was once used as currency. You don't think our means of testing is accurate? Do your thing . Do what makes you happy. Life is short.
We’re headed for an economic catastrophe. I’d rather have the constitutional / junk silver than take someone’s word for the value of an item that I don’t recognize. Junk silver has recognizable value. Practice with silver plate or obscure foreign coins and save the junk for us stackers.
Thank you for taking the time and using your chemicals and shop to show us how to do what you do & now we know to just turn it into a recycling center as the base metal under the silver. ❤❤
@@sreetips not sure if you will get to see my question to you but thought i would try to catch you here. I have some silver electronic wire pieces that dont dissolve in a hour of the acid. Will not turn blue niether in the dissolve state. Only in the copper bath does it turn blue. Any thoughts?
Hello and welcome back :) I'd wish you a happy New Year, but I think it would be nicer to wish you a BETTER year than last year :) And don't think what happened with your stockpot was a disaster...it'll be really exciting and interesting to see how you manage to get all the platinum back. Personally I can't wait to see how you're going to do it :) I'm sure a lot of viewers will agree with me. Thanks for another entertaining video
Just as plating I would never have imagined you could get that much silver off of that lid. Understand I dont doubt you a bit as I have learned how sharp you really are at this stuff. Im also extremely jealous at how productive you are and could only hope that I could ever do anything like what you do. I dont like toxic chemicals or agents. I would never work in a trade or plant that would put me anywhere near dangerous lab work. I worked in a production machineshop for just under 28yrs but I would bolt when they had painters painting the floor with very toxic paint. Whenever they painted in that building I bolted to get away. One of the painters never wore a mask I couldnt believe it. You would get a headache right away if you were anywhere near it. Im not exagerating. But you I have learned know exactly what you are doing. Do you have a chemistry degree because you work like a Scientist, I do really enjoy watching what you do and most of all when you end up with an incredible bar of Gold and Silver too. I always wonder if you really should be wearing a good mask or ventilator but I think you know what your doing.
He uses respirators and fume hoods when needed. Chemicals are perfectly safe when handed with safety and respect. No need to " bolt away " just be smart and safe. You sound kind of childish actually
We are now in 2023 : and It looks like that value is going up. There are three tangible items that will be worth so much after the dollar collapse. Everything else will be digital currency if we get lucky. Thank you for your demonstration it works for me.
Hey sreetips ! Thank you for all the great content you keep on making ! I have 10kg of silver plated items , it wont make sense to dissolve them in nitric as i will need alot of nitric to do that . I was wondering if sanding the silver off and refining the dust would be a better option ?
I have wondered how using a very course ceramic grit in a vibrating or even in a rotating polishing setup would work. I initially had the idea to strip gold off of pins and fingers etc. as a way to speed up the process by not having to devolve all of the copper
Awesome, I’m clumsy so I wouldn’t try my ideas myself. I have a box of gold and silver plated jewelry and some 40%coins I’d like to eventually get the gold silver and copper from. are their trustworthy refiners I could send to that don’t charge an arm and two legs for it. But seriously I pretty much can do it but I’d need instruction step by step on paper just so I don’t miss any steps
37:32 I assume this is Copper chloride solution with some trace silver chloride some trace copper nitrate and unconverted silver nitrate in that white bucket. Can this be mixed in with your silver waste bucket with the pour offs from regular silver cementation?
I'd say it is a profitable venture seeing where the bidding is, at current time. Quite Profitable if I do say so myself. Great video. Once again you don't disappoint.
Reed and Barton was (is?) a maker of high quality sterling and silver plate items. They would heavily plate their items-I see some things marked "Quadruple plated" also.
Thanks for your great Video, very instructional as always ! One question, It´s possible to "UnPlate" the item, that is, using the appropriate electrolyte can electrically remove the thin layer of silver ? Maybe this way is economically feasible.
I finally got the store and I have huge silverware & scrap I gotta go through. It's time for me to learn it now. I told you I'd get that pawn shop in negotiations & now I own it😊
Welcome back. You've bee missed, @Sreetips. I like the addition of the cost vs return calculation in the vids. It's interesting to see the return on investment.
Hi Sreetips, I am a new watcher and you have me hooked. QUESTION: what is the orange gas and would it make the reaction and therefore nitric acid use more efficient if a condenser was used to drop it back into the beaker?
That was pretty interesting street. I recycle off and on and I have about 5 lb of silver plated copper wire. I would like to melt it down and retrieve the silver and copper to recycle the copper as copper 2 and take the silver to a jewelry store and get paid for the silver. Anyway of just melting it down on the store or with a propane torch? I'm not much into using chemicals.
What about extracting the gold from mineralized outcrops? Like say malichite and chrysicola to get the copper out, or silver from pyrargynite? Is there a way to get the gold out of the pyrite. I have a indigo blue metal with gold veins and pyrite in it that sets my metal detector off that has copper and iron keyed out so it dont read them. I want the gold out.
I really enjoyed this video and learning more about silver plate. I was surprised by the amount at the end. I also really liked going through the costs and seeing that it is not worth it to separate it. I wonder also though about how much the copper is worth that was in it. 😀😀
HI! I have a problem about silver recovery from silverplated silverware. The basic metal is zinc, then a thin layer of copper and then silverplating on. First i try to disolve whole spoon in nitric acid, but it starts to boil over the floor. I repead the proces with less concetrated nitric acid, the spoon is disolved, but i have a lot of powder on bottom, the liquid is blueish. So im guesing that zinc is on the bottom like powder, silver is in liquid? or did zinc something else to my silver? Now I will first melt the zinc away and scrap the upper layer down, and i will procced with that nugget forward
Zinc is soluble in nitric acid it will turn your solution green. Get a small sample of the blue liquid and test it with a few drops of hydrochloric acid like I did in the video. What ever is on the bottom, it shouldn't be zinc. It might be your silver.
@@sreetips Hi again. I finished disolving silverplated silverware in nitric acid, filtered it and put Hcl and nothing happened. Like no silver inside. No cloudiness... ;( Should I try put copper inside to cement silver? But now I have second problem with recovering gold from cpu...I disolved 15cpu and few ram sticks in Hcl + hidrogen perokside (little), put those goldplating leaves in aqua regia, they disolved, filtered the liquid and today I got my smb by mail, (in Slovenia hard to buy), and surprise...nothing happened with liquid..like no mud at the bottom, still green yelowish colour...I put it so much that smb sit on the bottom...no reaction. Do you know what could go wrong? Should I put a little bit of urea inside?
Is there any way to strip the silver off without completely dissolving the base metals as well, or will the silver continue to cement out onto the base metal requiring that is be completely dissolved? I have a very large amount of silver plated items that I was hoping to strip, and am trying to figure out exactly how much nitric acid and total volume of liquids will be required throughout the process.
Several other items missing from the cost analysis. Not a very cost effective way to obtain silver, but the chemistry was interesting. I am glad YOU did it.
Hi, love your video's. I have a question about my project. I came into some electronic silver wire pieces from my work. I've followed your refining process to find out that im able to retrieve some silver from the wire but cant get all of the wire to melt all the way. Also while the acid is working the silver wires the mixture of acid, and distilled water turns a light grey and not the blue color. Im thinking the wire pieces are not copper, and silver mixed? Do you have an idea? It does turn blue when im at the next phase of adding the copper pieces into solution. Would appreciate your thoughts
If copper returns is in your wire then the solution will be blue once dissolved. No blue, no copper. Get some silver testing solution and check your wire for silver BEFORE putting it in acid. If you want a proper outcome then make sure your inputs are correct.
"Thick" silver plate is often silver "clad" rather than plate. This is done when the flat sheet of metal is made, already clad in the silver then it stamped out and presses into shape.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, i'm working in a mining lab so we assay gold and silver from ore and pb concetrates. I dissolve the dore button with nitric acid with the purpose to dissolve silver and get a gold button and calculate its content in the samples. I generate a lot of silver nitrate solution every day and I precipitate it with HCl. I will suggest a method based on yours to take benefit of this waste and recover some silver. Greetings from Mexico.
First time watching! Stumbled upon video while researching Büchner funnel uses. I have a bunch of those Büchner funnels. Are they worth waiting to sell to people on eBay?
Would it be possible to rinse the plated items with acid removing the upper layer until all of the silver is dissolved and then discard or scrap the brass/copper base metal? That would reduce the amount of acid consumed.
Another question. Is tap water needed in the transition to silver oxide? Is there something in tap water imperative to the transition or is distilled water okay to use???
Sometimes you can answer these questions by yourself, but to do so required an understanding of the rxn that's occurring. Since you already know (or were given the information) that when you take sodium hydroxide and mix with hydrochloric acid, you obtain common table salt. You can extend the idea here: what happens when the same (lye) is mixed with silver chloride? Since lye pulled the chlorine off of the hydrochloric acid to give sodium chloride, intuition tells us that lye, when mixed with silver chloride, will also pull the chloride off, to give sodium chloride! But what about the silver part in silver chloride? We got the chloride part to give salt. The silver part stays behind as silver oxide (oxide because the the silver takes on the hydroxyl in the lye, giving the oxide). But what tf does any of this have to do with tap water?! I'm glad you asked. Nowhere in this set of reactions did a special or trace ingredient need to be used for the rxn to occur. Special minerals, dissolved metals, and other impurities in tap H2O were never called out. In fact, not once were they even mentioned. Therefore, being guided by just a simple, intuitive understanding of the chemistry behind this reaction, we are definitely in a position to answer the question once and for all. And the answer is: NO! There is no special quality to the tap water; one may use any kind of water for this - hard water, soft, water, tapped, distilled, reverse osmosis, hot, cold... Insolong as it's water, it shall work........
I have a question? When you melted your silver cement in the wet filter. Did you use any flux like Borax? I know you glazed you dish before melting? Did you add borax to that silver burn? Streetips your my favorite you tube channel. I have learned so much. Never stop doing your vids. Thxs so much
What would happen if you melted it all down into an alloy first , using silver-copper alloy shot instead of just chopping it up and dissolving it. Would that help prevent the silver from cementing out over and over again?
wow, that was very interesting. thank you for that. now I don't know much about everything you were doing, but I was following u. to my lay understanding. all metals of the periodic table are soluable? is that true or then my spelling.😁
Robert, nitric will dissolve silver, copper, brass, zinc. But nitric won't dissolve gold, platinum, aluminum or stainless steel. Some metals are soluble in certain acids but insoluble in others. We can use this knowledge to selectively separate metals from each other.
Hello, how you know that you didnt wet too far when you add the NaOH? is there any other way to change AgCl to silver? When i am doing this in large scale, i have some lump of AgCl which dont react with NaOH.
If I can ask honestly, is it worth it to purchase nitric acid or distill your own? I depleted a fair amount of junk silver but I'm not quite sure what the best way to purify is. If you could comment on what works best for you I would appreciate it.
Got a question Mate - I tried following you, but to less sodium hydroxide in and than already put th3 sugar, than noticed that Nothing comes out, so I add more naoh after the sugar was added, than it reacted and got hot, but no silver participated out, so what doing now? Cheers and thanks for.sharing
Great video. Would this process be the same if I wanted to recover silver from the waste that I got from my initial gold recovery? To be more precise I recovered gold from CPUs but I know there's silver in the waste. Do I recover this silver like you've done in this video so basically adding distilled water and nitric acid to the waste solution and continuing like u did or is there another way? Would highly appreciate your reply. Thank you so much.
Or do I add copper to the waste solution to cement the silver out. I'm a little confused as to what the next step will be to recover the silver. Help pls. 😬
If you have silver in solution then you can add copper to "cement" the silver out. However, if your solution contains any hydrochloric acid then this won't work. Hydrochloric acid added to a silver nitrate solution will immediately precipitate silver chloride. The silver chloride can be recovered and converted to pure silver metal with lye and sugar. You can test your unknown solution by putting some in a test tube then add HCl. If silver is present then you'll immediately see a cloud is silver chloride form.
I have a question about cementing, I'm in the process of cementing silver from my solution but instead of my copper is turning a reddish- brown on top of the silver. Any idea what it could be?
Would it be more economically feasible to reverse electroplate the plated material instead of dissolving everything? Say like you had a good amount of plated silver utensils?
hello. I've been using hydrochloric/peroxide to dissolve my base metals from gold filled material. How can I recover silver from the hydrochloric/peroxide solution
I wanted to watch this, to see silver recovery I have thousands and thousands of silver contacts. I want to someday process. It looks like it should be one of the easier pm to process, but I'm going to study and study until I'm very confident I can do it. Probably years in the future. Thanks for the GREAT VIDEO!!!
Hi I enjoy watching your videos but I have a question , I have been refining computer scrap and doing very well however the last lot of gold plated pins there was 220 grams of them , I am having problems , now I used 1000 ml of distilled water and 100 ml of nitric acid , now my problem is that the solution turned green and not blue , does this mean that they are brass pins and not copper and what must I do to get the gold out of the solution , need help , thank you Gavin Keates .
Gavin, there are three possibilities for your green solution. Nickel, iron and zinc (brass is copper alloyed with zinc). These will all turn the solution green. It matters not if your gold is in solution with any of these metals, or with all of then at the same time. Adding SMB will selectively precipitate the gold and leave the other metals behind in solution. The problem comes when you have any of these metals in solid metallic form in with your gold. The gold will "cement" out of solution just as fast as it dissolves if you have pieces of solid base metal in there. However, you may have another problem. 220 grams of gold plated pins will have very little gold yield, almost nothing. It's best to recover gold from gold plated items in a sulfuric acid stippling cell. I have several videos on how to do it.
I would really appreciate if you replyed to this. If you were just getting started in metal refining so you have chemicals (I.e. nitric), would you think it safe enough and ok to do everything outside, still with the appropriate equipment and safety stuff but without a fume hood? This is just because I wanted to get some sort of a better insight into this as if you think it unsafe I wouldn't do it. I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks :)
I did my reactions in the back yard before I bought my fume hood. It was hard because rain would be a problem. Also, no matter how hard I tried, I always got some fumes in my nostrils. Holding my breath while adding reagents didn't work very well.
@@sreetips ok, thankyou very much, I think I will go for it outside as recently here in Britain it hasn't rained much, however I will get a big fan to hopefully blow most of the fumes away, many thanks, love watching your videos!
swbyrd bras is alloy of 85% copper and 15% zinc. Zinc, being more reactive and therefore above copper in the reactivity series, will not cement out on the copper. The zinc will stay in solution.
Hello, the greatest chemist in the world, thank you for spreading your experience to the viewers. I have an urgent question. I am working on extracting gold from rocks and stones crushed with aqua regia, and I work on large quantities. I have a problem, which is how do I know that the solution is saturated and will not be able to dissolve more gold and I have to replace it? Thank you
Wondering about sandblasting the silver plate off of the items, then separating the sand and metals with simple tap water and a gold pan. Would allow you to drastically reduce the amount of nitric acid required to pull this off. Could maybe boost the financial feasibility of this specific operation.
I use reverse electroplating to remove silver plate it's actually rather simple to use and drastically reduces the amount of copper contamination to be removed later with the acids (also saves time because the removed silver plate falls off in small thin pieces and copper contaminant is a fine powder that desolves quickly). I use salt water as electrolyte and a car battery charger as a power source...
@Jacob Shrewsbury make sure to check your electroplated solution for silver after u get the silver flakes out, is usually leftover silver suspended in solution u can't see.
My local thrift stores all have piles of old silverplate-no one wants it anymore, and no one wants to polish it,either. I'm always on the hunt for Sterling, and I've found that Sterling items are ALWAYS marked "Sterling" -especially things made in the US. If you are serious about finding Sterling "in the wild", you have to know foreign hallmarks also-they won't say "Sterling" on them, but maybe just a stamped ".925" or something similar. British hallmarks are more involved, but you are always looking for the lion with the raised paw. At every thrift store, I always go through all the silverplate and old silverware-I've found an amazing amount of overlooked Sterling. My most common find are "weighted Sterling" candleholders-I've found dozens of them in the past two years. They are all just a thin skin of silver around a heavy cement or plaster base, but it all adds up.
The little symbol A is a good guide as to the quality of the silver plate. There are tons of different systems and no standard but a century or so ago, many British makers used followed the gradings ...
A1 = Superior, A = Standard and then lower and lower grades below that B, C, D, E based on how many pennyweight was plated on. A1 was usually a troy ounce of silver per 12 tablespoons or forks.
Also don't get confused with stamped in Old English font which looks like a hallmark. That's electroplated nickel silver and usually pretty thin.
Thanks, really good to know :)!
There is also Extra 1a NS, 1a NS & Alpaca markings in Europe..
Your videos have gotten much better over the last several years........ This one is new to me, but important for me to learn how much effort I should put into plated vs. sterling pieces.... Thanks
You are the Superman of recovering precious metal videos. Always worth watching and thanks Superman.
I think of him as the Walter White of home refining....LOL!
Mr Sreetips there is a very easy way to de-plate silver. A tub of salt water with a piece of stainless steel for the negative contact and hook the positive contact to the piece of plated silver. Run a current through it for 10-15 min and the silver will flake off
If you undershoot a little bit with the HCl, so you leave just a little silver nitrate in solution. You can filter out your silver chloride, and save the filtrate. You can then use the filtrate to dissolve more silver items, because when you add the HCl you also create nitric acid. You just want to undershoot with the HCl, because if some is left over it will react with the silver and form a AgCl coating keeping the nitric from dissolving it. That way you can save some money on buying more nitric. I actually just did this, it worked out pretty well.
There is a much cheaper way of doing silver plate. The formula is 19 parts sulfuric acid to one part nitric acid. Heat but only to about 140 F. The silver plate will turn white as it dissolves in the solution. When the white is gone, that piece is done. I use three buckets and a plastic colander. I let one batch drain while the next batch is working in the solution. After a batch is drained, I rinse in bucket number one, still in the colander, then bucket number two, then dumped in an empty bucket. Buckets one and two have two gallons of tap water in them. When the solution is spent, it will be very dark and will not take any more silver. I let the solution cool down to ambient temperature. I pour half the solution in each of the water buckets and add a saturated solution of un-iodized saltwater to turn the silver into silver chloride. Work it into silver metal as you wish. You might want to try it in one of your great videos. You do a great job. I enjoy them very much.
Frank, I printed this comment for future reference. I may try this later on. Thank you for the suggestion.
Same as sree I have over 30 plates cups bowls ectect collecting
I would love to see the process used.
Hi frank zahn, my name is Joshua. I processed some e-waste a decent amount of it for gold and I have a lot of the waist but I know there must be silver in. Personally, I think there’s a lot of silver, but I can’t figure out why it won’t precipitate. I don’t know if I neutralized the solution or not so I’m going to try that one more time, but can you give me any advice? I really need help on this because I could use the silver right now. Do you have the time please answer me back. Thank you.
@@sreetips hello sir, my name is Joshua. I asked the same question to the gentleman above. You seem like someone who is busy so I didn’t think to even ask you first. I processed some e-waste a while back, and the waste made a very deep, dark green solution. I know there’s a lot of silver in it but I can’t figure out how to precipitate it out. I have added hydrochloric acid to it. I’ve put copper in the solution hoping to cement it out. Can you please help me?
some companies call it Ultraplate, some call it Extraplate. I only found about it awhile back because my grandma had a bunch of it, than I started looking into it. It is very common, mostly older pieces but some newer ones can be found. Yes you can find several pieces with with very thin plating but thick plating isn't rare
Glad to see you back on!!!
Yay you're back! I was worried about your wrists at times with that platinum.
I started buying junk silver from my area. I cant wait to try to do some refining.
Why? The junk silver is worth more than the silver you claim is pure. How can you prove that purity? I know the silver dime is 90% silver and I have a good idea of its weight and value.
@@allenjester3228 not when you call it just. Its worth less. Our testing things as humans have evolved over time. It was once used as currency. You don't think our means of testing is accurate? Do your thing . Do what makes you happy. Life is short.
We’re headed for an economic catastrophe. I’d rather have the constitutional / junk silver than take someone’s word for the value of an item that I don’t recognize. Junk silver has recognizable value. Practice with silver plate or obscure foreign coins and save the junk for us stackers.
@@allenjester3228 I get bars from my bank. Its all good.
@@frankz1125 What bank do you bank with ?
Glad you're back, thanks for the vid!
Thank you for taking the time and using your chemicals and shop to show us how to do what you do & now we know to just turn it into a recycling center as the base metal under the silver. ❤❤
I really enjoyed the calculation of the worth at the end there. Would love it if you did that in every video where you yield some precious metal.
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Love your videos my husband done his first gold recovery from scrap fingers. Thanks for the videos please keep them coming!!!
I'm trying to get my wife to make her own videos on how she finds the scrap for me to process. Without her I wouldn't be able to do this.
@@sreetips not sure if you will get to see my question to you but thought i would try to catch you here. I have some silver electronic wire pieces that dont dissolve in a hour of the acid. Will not turn blue niether in the dissolve state. Only in the copper bath does it turn blue. Any thoughts?
@@tracymcknight8978 some silver looking wire may be aluminum…
In your experience, what is the range of silver to total metal? It was 4.6% here but what is the general range? Thanks!
Thank you for sharing your calculation and satisfy my curiosity about the costs!
No commercials, I subscribed. love your videos!
Great video +Sreetips, enjoyed this as always!
Hello and welcome back :) I'd wish you a happy New Year, but I think it would be nicer to wish you a BETTER year than last year :) And don't think what happened with your stockpot was a disaster...it'll be really exciting and interesting to see how you manage to get all the platinum back. Personally I can't wait to see how you're going to do it :) I'm sure a lot of viewers will agree with me. Thanks for another entertaining video
I'll me getting to it starting Friday
Just as plating I would never have imagined you could get that much silver off of that lid. Understand I dont doubt you a bit as I have learned how sharp you really are at this stuff. Im also extremely jealous at how productive you are and could only hope that I could ever do anything like what you do. I dont like toxic chemicals or agents. I would never work in a trade or plant that would put me anywhere near dangerous lab work. I worked in a production machineshop for just under 28yrs but I would bolt when they had painters painting the floor with very toxic paint. Whenever they painted in that building I bolted to get away. One of the painters never wore a mask I couldnt believe it. You would get a headache right away if you were anywhere near it. Im not exagerating. But you I have learned know exactly what you are doing. Do you have a chemistry degree because you work like a Scientist, I do really enjoy watching what you do and most of all when you end up with an incredible bar of Gold and Silver too. I always wonder if you really should be wearing a good mask or ventilator but I think you know what your doing.
My degree is in Aviation. I’m a retired Naval Engineer. I get whiffs of fumes every now and then. SO2 gas is the worst for me.
He uses respirators and fume hoods when needed. Chemicals are perfectly safe when handed with safety and respect. No need to " bolt away " just be smart and safe. You sound kind of childish actually
We are now in 2023 : and It looks like that value is going up. There are three tangible items that will be worth so much after the dollar collapse. Everything else will be digital currency if we get lucky. Thank you for your demonstration it works for me.
Gold, silver, period.
glad your back, was concerned you stopped doing videos or something, keep up the good work!
Thanks Zach
Hey sreetips ! Thank you for all the great content you keep on making !
I have 10kg of silver plated items , it wont make sense to dissolve them in nitric as i will need alot of nitric to do that . I was wondering if sanding the silver off and refining the dust would be a better option ?
Good thought that way you would need much less nitric acid. Flat areas would be easier, relief areas would be tough.. Good idea though.
1
Ceviri
I have wondered how using a very course ceramic grit in a vibrating or even in a rotating polishing setup would work.
I initially had the idea to strip gold off of pins and fingers etc. as a way to speed up the process by not having to devolve all of the copper
sanbladt and screen
Glad to see you back. Was worried that the little fiasco sapped your will to make videos. Keep them coming.
what little fiasco?
@@OwlTech333 In the video of refining the stock pot. One of the beakers spilled all over the floor.
@@authorunknown7262 Thanks
@@OwlTech333 the platinum recovery spill from his last series.
This bar sold for $53.00 because it was a Sreetips Original!
Great to see you back again! I was hoping that the stock pot refining disaster did not take the wind out of your sails for continuing your videos.
Mike. I'm going to process all the paper from the mess I made. Should be several hundred dollars worth of metal.
Awesome, I’m clumsy so I wouldn’t try my ideas myself. I have a box of gold and silver plated jewelry and some 40%coins I’d like to eventually get the gold silver and copper from. are their trustworthy refiners I could send to that don’t charge an arm and two legs for it.
But seriously I pretty much can do it but I’d need instruction step by step on paper just so I don’t miss any steps
37:32 I assume this is Copper chloride solution with some trace silver chloride some trace copper nitrate and unconverted silver nitrate in that white bucket. Can this be mixed in with your silver waste bucket with the pour offs from regular silver cementation?
I would like to see you do a refining of keyboard mylars & to know if you know how you could incenerate the mylars to recover the silver
I'm thrilled that you are making videos again. I was happy to make a small contribution to help continue this awesome content.
Mike, I am grateful to you, thank you! More videos are coming.
Watching this now shows how much your processes have changed in the last few years.
Thank you for this video very informative. I am interested to know what the copper solution is. Is it copper oxicloride?
The blue liquid is copper nitrate.
Thanks for the video. It was very informative and I enjoyed it. 👍🏻
I'd say it is a profitable venture seeing where the bidding is, at current time. Quite Profitable if I do say so myself. Great video. Once again you don't disappoint.
Thank you for this. I am looking at silver recovery and now know on cost yield ratio
I am glad that you recharged and are back at it.
Reed and Barton was (is?) a maker of high quality sterling and silver plate items. They would heavily plate their items-I see some things marked "Quadruple plated" also.
Thanks for your great Video, very instructional as always ! One question, It´s possible to "UnPlate" the item, that is, using the appropriate electrolyte can electrically remove the thin layer of silver ? Maybe this way is economically feasible.
Yes it is, there are a few people who've posted videos on this :)!
There is a way to do it, but I’ve not mastered it. Maybe when silver gets up around a hundred bucks.
Could one get away with using a food grade sodium hydroxide or is there even much of a difference?
Welcome back sreetips! I have been waiting for new video... Also looking forward to see new videos in future. Especially platinum refining.
Coming very soon, thank you
I finally got the store and I have huge silverware & scrap I gotta go through. It's time for me to learn it now. I told you I'd get that pawn shop in negotiations & now I own it😊
Nice! Treat your customers right and you’ll do fantastic.
i wonder if the cost efficiency could be improved by grinding the silver off the surface first
Where do you buy the acid from
Happy New Year to you too!
Anyone know what to do when you’ve added to much lye? I added the sugar, no reaction still just black liquid
Thanks I was wondering that ✔️ I appreciate your work ‼️
Welcome back. You've bee missed, @Sreetips.
I like the addition of the cost vs return calculation in the vids. It's interesting to see the return on investment.
I'll try to give a brief overview of the roi in my videos from now on. I don't track expenses for each batch so it will be crude.
Hi Sreetips, I am a new watcher and you have me hooked. QUESTION: what is the orange gas and would it make the reaction and therefore nitric acid use more efficient if a condenser was used to drop it back into the beaker?
Orange gas = nitrogen dioxide. Refluxing it would improve efficiency.
Alright, here we go again. When you get to the end, please be careful and don't spill it all. Thanks for coming back to teach us
Good to see you back!
That was pretty interesting street. I recycle off and on and I have about 5 lb of silver plated copper wire. I would like to melt it down and retrieve the silver and copper to recycle the copper as copper 2 and take the silver to a jewelry store and get paid for the silver. Anyway of just melting it down on the store or with a propane torch? I'm not much into using chemicals.
If you melt the wire then the metals will alloy together.
Glad to see ya back Kadriver ,, some of us were going through with draws 🥴
Sreetips withdrawal, cold turkey.
Glad to see you back.
That last video was devastating.
I'm going to get some metal from that paper and cardboard. Watch for the video.
@@sreetips
We are all looking forward to seeing that.
This is absolutely one of the best science channels on UA-cam.
What about extracting the gold from mineralized outcrops? Like say malichite and chrysicola to get the copper out, or silver from pyrargynite? Is there a way to get the gold out of the pyrite. I have a indigo blue metal with gold veins and pyrite in it that sets my metal detector off that has copper and iron keyed out so it dont read them. I want the gold out.
Sorry, I don’t have any experience processing ore
I really enjoyed this video and learning more about silver plate. I was surprised by the amount at the end. I also really liked going through the costs and seeing that it is not worth it to separate it. I wonder also though about how much the copper is worth that was in it. 😀😀
Great video!!! When does adding borax make sense in process like this?
I add borax to the melt dish to keep the silver from sticking to the dish
Quick qustion for you chief. If there was some gold also in this solution would adding the hcl cause the gold to come out of solution with the silver?
No
Great video . glad your still active
What if you had cut that up into smaller pieces and added more plated items to that same use of acid?
Glad to see and what is the name of your gloves what type that is
Nitrile
Great video... I have learned so much from your vids...
Usually plated will have an “A” or “community plate”
HI! I have a problem about silver recovery from silverplated silverware. The basic metal is zinc, then a thin layer of copper and then silverplating on. First i try to disolve whole spoon in nitric acid, but it starts to boil over the floor. I repead the proces with less concetrated nitric acid, the spoon is disolved, but i have a lot of powder on bottom, the liquid is blueish. So im guesing that zinc is on the bottom like powder, silver is in liquid? or did zinc something else to my silver? Now I will first melt the zinc away and scrap the upper layer down, and i will procced with that nugget forward
Zinc is soluble in nitric acid it will turn your solution green. Get a small sample of the blue liquid and test it with a few drops of hydrochloric acid like I did in the video. What ever is on the bottom, it shouldn't be zinc. It might be your silver.
@@sreetips Hi again. I finished disolving silverplated silverware in nitric acid, filtered it and put Hcl and nothing happened. Like no silver inside. No cloudiness... ;( Should I try put copper inside to cement silver?
But now I have second problem with recovering gold from cpu...I disolved 15cpu and few ram sticks in Hcl + hidrogen perokside (little), put those goldplating leaves in aqua regia, they disolved, filtered the liquid and today I got my smb by mail, (in Slovenia hard to buy), and surprise...nothing happened with liquid..like no mud at the bottom, still green yelowish colour...I put it so much that smb sit on the bottom...no reaction. Do you know what could go wrong? Should I put a little bit of urea inside?
This was fun to watch but from a personal point of view, I believe the dish was more valuable as an attractive silver plate. Thanks.
It was a good looking dish, with an unusually thick coating of silver.
Do you have a video showing what you do with the blue copper mix? Do you chemically change it into copper???
Yes it can be done. Check Nurdrage youtube channel.
I change it to copper in my waste treatment bucket. The copper comes out of the blue solution as metallic copper on pieces of angle iron.
Is there any way to strip the silver off without completely dissolving the base metals as well, or will the silver continue to cement out onto the base metal requiring that is be completely dissolved? I have a very large amount of silver plated items that I was hoping to strip, and am trying to figure out exactly how much nitric acid and total volume of liquids will be required throughout the process.
Yes, but I’ve not tried it yet.
Several other items missing from the cost analysis. Not a very cost effective way to obtain silver, but the chemistry was interesting. I am glad YOU did it.
Me too
Nice vid, thanks. Do you think buying scrap silverplate is worth it?
Right now, with silver at $16, it would cost more to get the silver than it's worth. But that can change.
Hi, love your video's. I have a question about my project. I came into some electronic silver wire pieces from my work. I've followed your refining process to find out that im able to retrieve some silver from the wire but cant get all of the wire to melt all the way. Also while the acid is working the silver wires the mixture of acid, and distilled water turns a light grey and not the blue color. Im thinking the wire pieces are not copper, and silver mixed? Do you have an idea? It does turn blue when im at the next phase of adding the copper pieces into solution. Would appreciate your thoughts
If copper returns is in your wire then the solution will be blue once dissolved. No blue, no copper. Get some silver testing solution and check your wire for silver BEFORE putting it in acid. If you want a proper outcome then make sure your inputs are correct.
@@sreetips do you think i can send you some of this wire to test it for me?
"Thick" silver plate is often silver "clad" rather than plate. This is done when the flat sheet of metal is made, already clad in the silver then it stamped out and presses into shape.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, i'm working in a mining lab so we assay gold and silver from ore and pb concetrates. I dissolve the dore button with nitric acid with the purpose to dissolve silver and get a gold button and calculate its content in the samples. I generate a lot of silver nitrate solution every day and I precipitate it with HCl. I will suggest a method based on yours to take benefit of this waste and recover some silver. Greetings from Mexico.
Nice, glad you gained something. Thank you.
First time watching! Stumbled upon video while researching Büchner funnel uses. I have a bunch of those Büchner funnels. Are they worth waiting to sell to people on eBay?
If you find the right buyer. Not many even know what they are.
@@sreetips Great use of chemistry by the way! 👍
I'll buy some
@@-shortsfeed I’ll send some pictures after work. How many do you need?
Would it be possible to rinse the plated items with acid removing the upper layer until all of the silver is dissolved and then discard or scrap the brass/copper base metal? That would reduce the amount of acid consumed.
No, the silver will cement out just as fast as it dissolves.
Another question. Is tap water needed in the transition to silver oxide? Is there something in tap water imperative to the transition or is distilled water okay to use???
Sometimes you can answer these questions by yourself, but to do so required an understanding of the rxn that's occurring.
Since you already know (or were given the information) that when you take sodium hydroxide and mix with hydrochloric acid, you obtain common table salt. You can extend the idea here: what happens when the same (lye) is mixed with silver chloride? Since lye pulled the chlorine off of the hydrochloric acid to give sodium chloride, intuition tells us that lye, when mixed with silver chloride, will also pull the chloride off, to give sodium chloride! But what about the silver part in silver chloride? We got the chloride part to give salt. The silver part stays behind as silver oxide (oxide because the the silver takes on the hydroxyl in the lye, giving the oxide).
But what tf does any of this have to do with tap water?! I'm glad you asked.
Nowhere in this set of reactions did a special or trace ingredient need to be used for the rxn to occur. Special minerals, dissolved metals, and other impurities in tap H2O were never called out. In fact, not once were they even mentioned. Therefore, being guided by just a simple, intuitive understanding of the chemistry behind this reaction, we are definitely in a position to answer the question once and for all. And the answer is: NO! There is no special quality to the tap water; one may use any kind of water for this - hard water, soft, water, tapped, distilled, reverse osmosis, hot, cold... Insolong as it's water, it shall work........
I have a question? When you melted your silver cement in the wet filter. Did you use any flux like Borax? I know you glazed you dish before melting? Did you add borax to that silver burn? Streetips your my favorite you tube channel. I have learned so much. Never stop doing your vids. Thxs so much
I don’t think I did. But if I did it was very small amounts only
Where do you get your nitric? I need a good source. I’ve been making my own and it’s just too much trouble. Thanks
GFS chemicals
You didn't filter the test tube contents before pouring into the filtered solution. So it could be slightl impurities in the melted chunk...
What would happen if you melted it all down into an alloy first , using silver-copper alloy shot instead of just chopping it up and dissolving it. Would that help prevent the silver from cementing out over and over again?
That would just add another step to an already long process.
Sreetips what’s your source for nitric at that price? I have been making my own because it’s expensive but $15 a liter is great.
GFS Chemical, they require a business shipping address.
Very impressive. btw, how sugar can transfer silver oxide into pure silver?? is it a reduction reaction?
I'm not a chemist. I just know that adding the sugar converts the silver oxide to pure silver. Something to do with the carbon in the sugar, I think.
wow, that was very interesting. thank you for that. now I don't know much about everything you were doing, but I was following u. to my lay understanding. all metals of the periodic table are soluable? is that true or then my spelling.😁
Robert, nitric will dissolve silver, copper, brass, zinc. But nitric won't dissolve gold, platinum, aluminum or stainless steel. Some metals are soluble in certain acids but insoluble in others. We can use this knowledge to selectively separate metals from each other.
Hello, how you know that you didnt wet too far when you add the NaOH? is there any other way to change AgCl to silver? When i am doing this in large scale, i have some lump of AgCl which dont react with NaOH.
I use a Braun, hand held blender to mix to consistent black color - it’s perfect
If I can ask honestly, is it worth it to purchase nitric acid or distill your own? I depleted a fair amount of junk silver but I'm not quite sure what the best way to purify is. If you could comment on what works best for you I would appreciate it.
I’ve never attempted to make my own nitric acid. Much easier to buy it already made.
Got a question Mate - I tried following you, but to less sodium hydroxide in and than already put th3 sugar, than noticed that Nothing comes out, so I add more naoh after the sugar was added, than it reacted and got hot, but no silver participated out, so what doing now? Cheers and thanks for.sharing
That’s baffling, I’ve never encountered that.
Great video. Would this process be the same if I wanted to recover silver from the waste that I got from my initial gold recovery? To be more precise I recovered gold from CPUs but I know there's silver in the waste. Do I recover this silver like you've done in this video so basically adding distilled water and nitric acid to the waste solution and continuing like u did or is there another way? Would highly appreciate your reply. Thank you so much.
Or do I add copper to the waste solution to cement the silver out. I'm a little confused as to what the next step will be to recover the silver. Help pls. 😬
If you have silver in solution then you can add copper to "cement" the silver out. However, if your solution contains any hydrochloric acid then this won't work. Hydrochloric acid added to a silver nitrate solution will immediately precipitate silver chloride. The silver chloride can be recovered and converted to pure silver metal with lye and sugar. You can test your unknown solution by putting some in a test tube then add HCl. If silver is present then you'll immediately see a cloud is silver chloride form.
That makes sense now. Thank you so much 😀
Can you do this with old sliver forks, spoons & knifes that are electroplated is it the as sliver plating, please i would like to know, many thanks.
Yes, but it would use lots of expensive nitric acid.
I have a question about cementing, I'm in the process of cementing silver from my solution but instead of my copper is turning a reddish- brown on top of the silver. Any idea what it could be?
No, i have never seen that happen
Did you say $5 for the plate also. So an even lower return?
In the UK most silver plated items have the "EPNS" stamped on them. This stands for Electro Plated Nickel Silver.
Ive seen it. I look for EP (electroplated) but I can also tell by the texture of the surface.
What do you do with the copper solution, can you recover from that?
Check nurd forge . You can recover copper metal and nitric acid.
Would it be more economically feasible to reverse electroplate the plated material instead of dissolving everything? Say like you had a good amount of plated silver utensils?
I don’t know how to deplete silver.
hello. I've been using hydrochloric/peroxide to dissolve my base metals from gold filled material.
How can I recover silver from the hydrochloric/peroxide solution
Should be silver chloride
I wanted to watch this, to see silver recovery I have thousands and thousands of silver contacts. I want to someday process. It looks like it should be one of the easier pm to process, but I'm going to study and study until I'm very confident I can do it. Probably years in the future.
Thanks for the GREAT VIDEO!!!
Make sure there is no cadmium in those contacts.
Fascinating video. Well done. 👍
Hi I enjoy watching your videos but I have a question , I have been refining computer scrap and doing very well however the last lot of gold plated pins there was 220 grams of them , I am having problems , now I used 1000 ml of distilled water and 100 ml of nitric acid , now my problem is that the solution turned green and not blue , does this mean that they are brass pins and not copper and what must I do to get the gold out of the solution , need help , thank you Gavin Keates .
Gavin, there are three possibilities for your green solution. Nickel, iron and zinc (brass is copper alloyed with zinc). These will all turn the solution green. It matters not if your gold is in solution with any of these metals, or with all of then at the same time. Adding SMB will selectively precipitate the gold and leave the other metals behind in solution. The problem comes when you have any of these metals in solid metallic form in with your gold. The gold will "cement" out of solution just as fast as it dissolves if you have pieces of solid base metal in there. However, you may have another problem. 220 grams of gold plated pins will have very little gold yield, almost nothing. It's best to recover gold from gold plated items in a sulfuric acid stippling cell. I have several videos on how to do it.
I would really appreciate if you replyed to this. If you were just getting started in metal refining so you have chemicals (I.e. nitric), would you think it safe enough and ok to do everything outside, still with the appropriate equipment and safety stuff but without a fume hood? This is just because I wanted to get some sort of a better insight into this as if you think it unsafe I wouldn't do it. I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks :)
I did my reactions in the back yard before I bought my fume hood. It was hard because rain would be a problem. Also, no matter how hard I tried, I always got some fumes in my nostrils. Holding my breath while adding reagents didn't work very well.
@@sreetips ok, thankyou very much, I think I will go for it outside as recently here in Britain it hasn't rained much, however I will get a big fan to hopefully blow most of the fumes away, many thanks, love watching your videos!
If the base metal is brass would it still try to cement while dissolving because of the copper content?
swbyrd bras is alloy of 85% copper and 15% zinc. Zinc, being more reactive and therefore above copper in the reactivity series, will not cement out on the copper. The zinc will stay in solution.
Hello, the greatest chemist in the world, thank you for spreading your experience to the viewers. I have an urgent question. I am working on extracting gold from rocks and stones crushed with aqua regia, and I work on large quantities. I have a problem, which is how do I know that the solution is saturated and will not be able to dissolve more gold and I have to replace it? Thank you
Extracting gold from crushed rock is not something I have experience with.
U say rhe testing solution is dilute nitric + potassium dichromate, what are you doing to the nitric initially to make it 'dilute'?
50/50 nitric dh20
Wondering about sandblasting the silver plate off of the items, then separating the sand and metals with simple tap water and a gold pan. Would allow you to drastically reduce the amount of nitric acid required to pull this off. Could maybe boost the financial feasibility of this specific operation.
I use reverse electroplating to remove silver plate it's actually rather simple to use and drastically reduces the amount of copper contamination to be removed later with the acids (also saves time because the removed silver plate falls off in small thin pieces and copper contaminant is a fine powder that desolves quickly). I use salt water as electrolyte and a car battery charger as a power source...
@Jacob Shrewsbury make sure to check your electroplated solution for silver after u get the silver flakes out, is usually leftover silver suspended in solution u can't see.