# refining silver without nitric acid??



## cristianrash

hi everyone

my question is, is there some method besides using the aqua regia with nitric acid base to made this proccess?

in my country, is impossible to obtain nitric acid, only the big manufacturers can buy them, is any other procces
that could be used to refining this metal? 

P.S. i use the search engine of the forums, but i could find other proccess that doesn't uses nitric acid
P.S.2. i'm a newbie yes, but please don't be pretentius and rude, i can understan with simple words
is not neccessary to be an rude and mean


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## bmgold2

I'd try looking up poorman's nitric. Here's a link to get started but there is lots of info on making your own nitric on this forum.

http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1330&p=11223&hilit=sulfate+and+nitric#p11223

Just because you can't buy nitric acid doesn't mean you can't make it from stuff you can buy. Just be careful and study about how to do it safely. 

Lasersteve's guided tour is also a great place to check out if you haven't yet. 

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=6873#6873

bmgold2

Edit: You probably would want to drop the silver from the nitric using copper instead of salt since, from what I've been reading, silver chloride is harder to deal with to get back to metalic silver.


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## cristianrash

bmgold2 said:


> I'd try looking up poorman's nitric. Here's a link to get started but there is lots of info on making your own nitric on this forum.
> 
> http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1330&p=11223&hilit=sulfate+and+nitric#p11223
> 
> Just because you can't buy nitric acid doesn't mean you can't make it from stuff you can buy. Just be careful and study about how to do it safely.
> 
> Lasersteve's guided tour is also a great place to check out if you haven't yet.
> 
> http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=6873#6873
> 
> bmgold2
> 
> Edit: You probably would want to drop the silver from the nitric using copper instead of salt since, from what I've been reading, silver chloride is harder to deal with to get back to metalic silver.




thanks for your time and kindness, i will take time to study those guides


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## nickvc

I'm sorry but without decent nitric you really are going to struggle to refine silver properly, other acids such as sulphuric can dissolve it but not as efficiently and with the ease of recovery.
Poor mans nitric really isn't much good for silver refining so if you really are intent on doing this try to find a source of decent nitric acid.


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## bmgold2

nickvc said:


> I'm sorry but without decent nitric you really are going to struggle to refine silver properly, other acids such as sulphuric can dissolve it but not as efficiently and with the ease of recovery.
> Poor mans nitric really isn't much good for silver refining so if you really are intent on doing this try to find a source of decent nitric acid.



Just curious why poor mans nitric isn't much good for silver? I'll admit I only ever dissolved a very small piece of silver with the little bit of homemade nitric I made but it did dissolve. Then I added a little salt and it precipitated back out. I stopped there and filtered the silver chloride out and it turned black. It was only a little bit so I didn't try recovering it (yet). Maybe it won't dissolve/hold as much silver? I'd like to know if and why the homemade nitric can't be used since it is a lot easier and cheaper to get silver to try refining than it is gold and I was thinking of starting with silver from scrap keyboards, relay contacts, and other sources. As far as I know, nitric acid can still be purchased here in the USA but the cost including the hazardous shipping is too much to even think it is worth buying for $20 an ounce silver.

bmgold


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## nickvc

Use the search function on using poor mans nitric for silver refining, it will do a certain amount of work but the contaminants from its production will cause problems at some point. 
Silver while easy to refine in many ways needs good quality nitric for proper processing depending on the quality of product you wish to produce and if you intend to run a cell and produce 999 you will need nitric and distilled water.


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## bmgold2

nickvc said:


> Use the search function on using poor mans nitric for silver refining, it will do a certain amount of work but the contaminants from its production will cause problems at some point.
> Silver while easy to refine in many ways needs good quality nitric for proper processing depending on the quality of product you wish to produce and if you intend to run a cell and produce 999 you will need nitric and distilled water.



Thanks, I guess there just isn't any shortcuts to refine this stuff. It looks like the homemade nitric would need to be distilled to get rid of the sulfate salts. Distilling nitric acid just sounds a little too dangerous without proper labware. Then you would need a lot more silver to pay for the fancy glass.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=15992

bmgold


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## goldsilverpro

If you really want to do this, get some real nitric and do it right.


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## MysticColby

if you have absolutely no ability to buy nitric acid, it is possible to make it. first thing that comes to mind is sulfuric acid + sodium nitrate. but to make nitric that will work with silver, you need to distill it. hazardous because of hot acids and it never did work for me... If you can't get nitric, you probably will have a hard time getting sulfuric (maybe from drain cleaner or car batteries?)
anyways, as an alternative:
what source of silver are you starting with?
if it's solid sterling silver, a silver cell should work well enough. the electrolyte would need replacing more often than normal, but it would work. basic setup: sterling silver ingot as the anode (with muslin cloth), graphite block or stainless steel cathode, electrolyte is 157g silver nitrate dissolved in 1L deionized water. I assume you're able to buy silver nitrate. a quick check on ebay shows several sellers, though a bit more expensive than the silver + nitric it takes to make it. I would estimate that 1L of electrolyte could reclaim 700g sterling silver (electrolyte has 100g of silver in it, it takes more nitrate per copper atom, so 100g silver = 58.91g copper. sterling has 7.5% copper = 58.91g copper in 785g sterling. the cell requires at least some silver nitrate to work). Once spent, you could reclaim any silver left in the electrolyte. you probably won't get higher than 99% just because the starting material is so impure, but it's a good start. you could take the crystals from the first cell and run it through a second cell with fresh electrolyte and that would refine it further.


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## Westerngs

There is one other way to refine silver without nitric acid.

It can be done in a furnace such as a reverbatory furnace or some type of blast furnace. I have first hand experience at this.

The silver needs to be melted without a flux cover so that it is constantly exposed to air. A rotary blast furnace would be best so that the silver is constantly mixed and the surface always contains base metals being exposed to atmosphere. The base metals will oxidize. Obviously, the time it takes to get to pure silver depends on the base metal content. Also, if there is gold present, that will remain in the silver.

There are some serious drawbacks to this method. It is time consuming, you potentially emit a large amount of base metals into the air unless you have a very good baghouse to collect the emissions, and you will lose a good percentage of silver to oxidation. If you have a baghouse, most of the silver can be recovered from the baghouse dust. For very large operations, a wet electrostatic precipitator will help recover nearly 100% of the silver emissions, although present with a very large amount of base metals.

Using this method, it is possible to get to 999's silver.

Edited to correct 1005 to 100% in "recover nearly 100% of silver emissions"


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## nickvc

Westerngs I remember that when I worked for JM many years ago they used a similar process on the low gold bars but again I'm not sure of the losses involved but I'm fairly sure that for the home refiner wouldn't be able to do this and recover all the values sucessfully.


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## butcher

If you cannot get or make good nitric acid, then refining silver would be very hard, it is a relatively cheap metal, and a profit can be made by trading it unrefined, refining it without a source of nitric acid would be costly, and I doubt the improvement in the metal, and the cost to get it refined would pay, if you spent more money to refine the metal than the metal is worth, if you cannot refine silver economically sell it and get a metal you can refine economically.

Even a cave man could make nitric acid, from materials he had available to him, but I do not know he could make a profit from refining silver in his cave.

Even where you cannot get chemicals you could make nitrates, and nitric acid, even sulfuric acid can be made, nitrates can come from soil and animal waste, sulfuric acid can be made from rocks, it could be possible to make pure nitric acid from these, but the time trouble and cost would eat up any profit with silver.

If you can get nitrate's and sulfuric acid and learned to make nitric acid and distill it you could then use it to refine silver, but I do not think you would make much profit on a small scale doing so.

If you can easily buy nitric acid and the cost is so high, you may not make a profit spending that money on refining silver.

To make a profit you would need cheap silver scrap, and cheap nitric acid.


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## rickbb

Not trying get off topic here, but. I was in Yellowstone last week and visited a hot spring that was 50% sulfuric acid. It had a bacteria in it that converted the hydrogen sulfide into sulfuric and since it was near the boiling point of water it was self concentrating to the 50% level by evaporating the water off.

Anyway I thought it was cool.


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## bmgold2

rickbb said:


> Not trying get off topic here, but. I was in Yellowstone last week and visited a hot spring that was 50% sulfuric acid. It had a bacteria in it that converted the hydrogen sulfide into sulfuric and since it was near the boiling point of water it was self concentrating to the 50% level by evaporating the water off.
> 
> Anyway I thought it was cool.



Off topic but interesting.

http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Yellowstone_Acid_Pools

I wonder if some of these extremophiles could be useful for treating sulfide ores? I seem to remember reading about some bio-leaching or something like that. I doubt you could get away with taking a few buckets of this natural sulfuric acid from a national park but it would be nice to be able to harvest your own acids for refining your gold. Probably a lot of other impurities dissolved in it already anyway.

bmgold2


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## Westerngs

Nickvc wrote: "Westerngs I remember that when I worked for JM many years ago they used a similar process on the low gold bars but again I'm not sure of the losses involved but I'm fairly sure that for the home refiner wouldn't be able to do this and recover all the values sucessfully."

Nick, you are right, it would be impossible for the home refiner to recover "all" values. I would expect losses on the 10-15% range.

I have often thought about a small home made wet scrubber to help recover those losses. It would involve a swamp cooler with the blower set up to suck air into the swamp cooler rather than blow air out. The wet swamp cooler pads would then trap the silver as it travels across them. I estimate you could reduce the losses from 10-15% to 5% or lower. Still pretty hefty losses though.

For the impure gold you mention I would probably start with the Miller process first. But not at home, the chlorine gas is deadly.


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## nickvc

Westerngs it was many years ago I remember this from and I think they were firing sweeps bars, low grade with high base metals but I could be wrong, it was done as an experiment I believe but I wasn't made aware of the outcome.


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