Hi everyone
I happened to receive 822g (1.81 lbs) of mylars (with that blank sheet between them). There were 41 pieces.
I used 10% lye solution (that is 10g lye mixed with 100ml of water).
Here are some pictures,
Here is what mylar looks like after 1.5 hrs of boiling in lye solution.
This time instead of filtering the ink and silver and melting them, I washed them into a beaker and dissolved the silver in nitric then filtered and added hcl to drop the silver as silver chloride.
Here is the silver chloride. After being washed few times I sprinkled zinc powder and mixed it with silver chloride, then added hcl to convert to elemental silver.
And here is the final silver shots from that mylar batch.
So net weight of silver from this batch is 9.05g silver from 822g mylars (41 pieces).
This calculates to 11g of silver per kg of mylars. Or 6.1g silver per lbs of mylars. In my last batch I did direct melting the silver and ink I got 6.7g silver per kg.
So it seems filtering the liberated ink and silver, then dissolve it in nitric filter and drop with hcl or cement with copper would be a better option.
Locally I can get mylars for about the price of 4g of silver per kg, so if I can get 11g silver from a kg of them, seems like a good deal.
Also I used a centrifuge to separate the silver inks from the mylars.
Best regards
KJ