I like collecting silver so for fun I was able to collect some fine industrial wire that is electroplated and I have just under 10 oz. of silver connected to fine pieces of copper wire. I found a video on it, and the yield is 2% so plenty of copper wire to deal with, and it's such fine pieces of wire. It seems cost-prohibitive to just go after silver like this. What happens to such fine pieces of copper wire when they get the nitric acid? I'd have to dissolve this stuff to separate it to start with?
Can people just melt this stuff down with a larger crucible, make a big block of it now, and deal with separating it all later?
This is assuming I could ever go through the process of getting the wire out it's sheathing which I'll never get around to doing. This is a good lesson in the difficulty of refining base metals. I enjoy scrapping copper, it's kind of a side hobby, I live in a city so I find it everywhere. I even became lazy and walked away from some nic easy to make bare stuff the other day. I can work a torch for taking metal apart, bending or breaking lose and rig pieces of metal together, I can wire a muffler up pretty fast!, but am far from metal master of anything.
Metal from a commodity standpoint is good to get to know as well, Alcoa stock went from 6 dollars to 18 dollar s a share this year, guessing aluminum prices went up, yeah well I hate recycling aluminum, they never give you anything for it.