I am really enjoying this forum so much and I appreciate all the information and the help that is provided. So, I wanted to share some tips that we do to make silver refining a little easier.
We no longer make or use cement silver and or silver shot instead we:
Hope this information is of help or least food for thought.
Jeff
We no longer make or use cement silver and or silver shot instead we:
- Carefully sort scarp silver and use only 800 or above silver materials.
- Clean silver scarp by ceramic ball burnishing and burnishing fluid.
- Clean small pcs of silver scarp in a up to a 30-liter ultrasonic cleaner.
- Air dry cleaned silver using a fan. (it's very fast)
- We melt the cleaned scarp into 45ozt anode bars. (Or make for the size of your basket) then we clean the finished anode bars with ball burnishing before using.
- We start with the three anode bars placed directly into a double perforated basket setup that has 2 layers of Muslin cloth in the outer basket and 1layer in the smaller anode basket.
- Add more anode bars as needed during the refining process.
- Typically using a 19qt stainless steel bowl and our yields are about 10lbs refined silver in max 15 days. (depending on the electrolyte solution you use)
- Using this process our silver easily hits the three nines+ mark.
- We found that hands down the solid bars much work better that using silver shot and its cleaner and easier to handle.
- Don't use Dacron vacuum cleaner bags for filter material.
- Use a fan to dry your materials rather than heat.
- No need to clean your scarp with chemicals and heat.
- By eliminating all the steps used for making cement silver, we reduce time, costs and all the hassles associated with handling and cleaning up messy waste solutions.
Hope this information is of help or least food for thought.
Jeff