# Silver inquart?



## rewalston (Jan 12, 2017)

I'm a little curious. I have no access to nitric acid or any nitrates at the moment. I was wonder if you melted sterling silver and copper together like you would inquart karat gold, and then corn flaked it. Would you be able to use AP to dissolve the copper out and get the silver as a chloride?

Rusty


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## butcher (Jan 13, 2017)

I would just use a concentrated solution of copper II chloride /iron chloride solution ( your used AP solution) and heat, the smaller the silver pieces the better.


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## Topher_osAUrus (Jan 13, 2017)

You could inquart and leech with sulfuric acid. 

Either silver or copper would work. But, to use concentrated, you would need to use silver. There was actually quite a bit of good old information on 911metallurgist about this, including ways of reducing the silver sulfide back to silver metal.

I have never used this methodology, but I have been reading up on it quite a bit after I first saw mention of it. I believe the reason why its not used more often is because of the dangers of hot sulfuric, and the silver sulfide can be a pain, especially silver bisulfide.(silver sulfide are yellow crystals, the bisulfide ones are small white mushy ones)

The way they would prevent the latter from forming is by decanting off the concentrated sulfuric (after leeching) and running steam over it until it reached 60% concentration. 

You could also use copper I would think, but you would then need to start your leech with a dilute concentration of sulfuric... So, that may be better, but I dont have any other insight beyond that...I will keep reading up on it though to see if there are any other points of interest on the subject.


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## rewalston (Jan 13, 2017)

butcher said:


> I would just use a concentrated solution of copper II chloride /iron chloride solution ( your used AP solution) and heat, the smaller the silver pieces the better.



ok I'll give that a try once I find all the pieces I have. Thank you Butcher.


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## rewalston (Jan 13, 2017)

Topher_osAUrus said:


> You could inquart and leech with sulfuric acid.
> 
> Either silver or copper would work. But, to use concentrated, you would need to use silver. There was actually quite a bit of good old information on 911metallurgist about this, including ways of reducing the silver sulfide back to silver metal.
> 
> ...



Thanks Topher, I think I'll stick with the knowns..Don't want to mess with Sulfuric yet.


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## Topher_osAUrus (Jan 13, 2017)

Yes, sulfuric is a nasty beast with many heads... 
Its dangerous concentrated, it is even more so when hot..
Its even quite bad to get dilute sulfuric on your skin if not quickly washed clean... The fumes from it (concentrated and hot) are also nasty.. 

Me and another member were just talking about the worst things to deal with, and I had to put sulfuric at the top of the list right beside lye... Anything you can get a drop of in your eye and lose vision for life is pretty bad. ...now i dont know if a drop of 98% sulfuric would make you go blind (don't want to be the one to test that hypotheses either..) but, I can speculate it would probably make you wish you didnt have an eye..

I use sulfuric a lot, for many different reasons: making copperas, removing lead from ar, my sulfuric cell, making nitric (not lately though), and many other things...even cleaning my drains. ..I have yet to do an inquart leech with it, but some day soon I will.


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## anachronism (Jan 13, 2017)

Topher what do you do with all those leeches wriggling around in your lab mate? It must get interesting...


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## Topher_osAUrus (Jan 13, 2017)

anachronism said:


> Topher what do you do with all those leeches wriggling around in your lab mate? It must get interesting...


 :lol: 
Im going to blame my autocorrect on that, for not automatically correcting me... ...wait, I guess that only corrects words spelled wrong, not misused ones...


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## lanfear (Jan 24, 2018)

Hi guys.

I have access to nitric, but it is exspencive. On the other hand I have axccess to free sulfuric.
I want to refine .825 and .925 to 999.
Could i use sulfuric in the first step to get out most of the base metals and then use nitric to get more out. The last step will be silver cell.
This is just a hobby and the mettals goes in to my retirement fund
My question is, are there any point to the first step our will I end up with .930 after the sulfuric and alot of extra steps?

Jon


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