# Silver flakes from silver plated cutlery



## shruli (Mar 13, 2022)

After seeing a thread about reverse electroplating silver with just water, I thought i'd have a go. I picked up some a1 plated cutlery from ebay, attached one piece to red & one to black of 12v charger & very little happened so added a bit of table salt hoping the reaction would speed up, & it did. Within a few minutes I had a colourful mud as pic1. I syphoned as much water out as I could, then added a cup of 15% hcl (brick cleaner) & like magic  all the mud dissolved in to the solution & I was left with the silver flakes in the bottom pic2. I'm guessing the next stage would be refine the flakes with nitric acid, which is difficult to get in the UK. Can anyone tell me what the likely purity would be, if I just boil washed them in hcl, then water, or if anyone knows of an alternative to purify the silver.
Many thanks
Keith


----------



## Martijn (Mar 17, 2022)

To refine silver you really need nitric. 
Why did you add dilute HCl? Did you want to make AgCl? 
How much plated silver did you process and how much salt did you add?


----------



## shruli (Mar 18, 2022)

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I need a licence in the UK to purchase nitric acid above 3% so that's not an option. I added the HCL to dissolve the base metals in solution, so I'm now presuming that adding HCL will make the silver AgCl? This is me being naïve, thinking silver would be simple to process compared to gold. I think I will stick to gold "for now"


----------



## nickvc (Mar 18, 2022)

If you can get concentrated sulphuric you can dissolve the silver in that but use care as heat is usually needed and hot sulphuric is not pleasant


----------

