Nitric acid and dissolving silver please help

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fivel_976

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 19, 2019
Messages
57
After watching you tube videos I decided to attempt to make my own nitric acid to dissolve my Sterling silver. I used the bubble method using standard muriatic acid 100ml Sally's volume 40 hydrogen peroxide (12%) 25 ml distilled water 50ml hi yield stump remover says 95-99% potassium nitrate 80grams and pure elemento copper 35grams. For some reason the final product has a light blue color and I know it's not bubbling over. But it will react with copper but when I tested it on a small piece of silver it wouldn't dissolve it even after 6 hours no reaction. Really need some guidance here
 
Sounds a bit complicated for a beginner, search the forum for "poorman's nitric acid". When distilled it will produce a fairly high quality acid.
 
HCl, H2O2, KNO3, and copper even if distilled would not make nitric acid suitable for silver, it could produce a form of aqua regia, which can attack copper and passivate silver with a crust of insoluble silver chloride.

The nitric solution needs to be chloride free.

If you only had a small number of chloride ions in the solution you could remove them by adding silver nitrate to the solution to precipitate the chloride ions as AgCl and decanting and filtering the insoluble AgCl from the homemade nitric solution, but by using hydrochloric acid as the acid to make up the solution, the solution would have so many chlorides chlorine and HCl to remove and it would not be worth the trouble or expense.

sulfuric acid to make the nitric would be a better source of acid, even then for use on silver it should be distilled, so as not to make silver sulfate.
 
So this method won't work for me. Is it cheaper to distill nitric my self or just suck it up and order it and where is the cheapest place to order some. Also what is the nitric acid I made mainly used from then? Could I use it to dissolve copper and use that to make my elemento copper instead of using copper sulfate crystals?
 
Nitrates salt and sulfuric acid will make a decent nitric acid substitute ("poormans nitric acid"), where we remove most of the sulfate salt which are less soluble, this solution works fairly well to use for nitric acid where silver is not involved and can be distilled for a more pure product to use on silver.

When you used HCl and nitrates it is closer to poormans aqua regia, the HCl and chlorine (even with the copper used) can distill over after the water and first portion of NOx, leaving you with chloric, chlorine, and or chloride ions in the acid solution.
Forget youtube, for now, you will just waste your time, and study on the forum to gain more understanding the answer you seek are here.
 
Sell it, and buy silver rounds,

Or trade your scrap for silver rounds.

Or if you are dedicated spend your time studying and learn how to refine it.

For a small lot the first two options.

To learn to refine silver I would plan on spending my time in research.
 
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