# Use of home made nitric



## Wyndham (Jun 19, 2008)

To use the process where silver is dissolved into nitric acid then dropped with copper, can the process of making nitric with HCL and sodium nitrite work effectively in the process?
Also since my test batch is to recover sterling to pure silver and using the copper cementing process creates copper nitrate, from what I'd read am I correct that after the silver is dropped I can decant the copper solution and add sodium hydroxide to drop out copper oxide?
Have I missed a point and gone into a dangerous reaction with the Sodium hydroxide?
I'm still gathering into before I start, Thanks for any help Wyndham


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## Anonymous (Jul 3, 2008)

HCL and sodium nitrate make a kind of aqua regia, which from what I have read does not work to well with high silver content.

sulfuric and sodium nitrate do, but I do not know how to convert back to silver.


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## lazersteve (Jul 3, 2008)

Wyndham,

Don't ruin the valuable copper nitrate solution by dropping out the copper. There are many refining uses for copper nitrate that I will be demonstrating soon. 

Filter it clean and bottle it up. You'll be very glad you did especially when working with sterling silver. :wink: 

If you use Poor Man's AR (HCl and Sodium Nitrate) for Silver you will end up with silver coated with silver chloride, not dissolved silver. To dissolve silver use nitric or homemade nitric from sulfuric and a nitrate salt (i.e. Sodium Nitrate).

I have other methods that do not require nitric acid to clean the copper out of sterling silver. I'm actually currently cleaning a 1.5 pound bar using zero nitirc acid.

Steve


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## Anonymous (Jul 3, 2008)

Steve,

I was running some silver solder as the anode rod experiment with KNO3 in water. I noticed that the copper silver alloy dissolved but did not evolve gas at the anode. The silver migrated over to the cathode and appeared to be reduced to silver powder by the KOH produced at the cathode, there was a gas from the cathode which I belive was hydrogen but I did not test to see. the copper stayed in solution and everthing went fine until the silver powder worked it was over to the cathode then the process slowed/stopped, I ended the experiment at that time and thaught this would work as a split cell with a piece of filter paper for the salt bridge.

Edit - I also thaught of using a split cell with copper sulfate to recover the gold from electronic scrap, I would just melt the gold containing metals or inquart with copper to make an anode and put in the split cell, the base metals would be able to bridge the salt bridge but the gold would just settle in the bottom of the cell, the only acid would be a little sulfuric in the cells.

jim


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## Lino1406 (Jul 4, 2008)

and copper should go before silver


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## Wyndham (Jul 4, 2008)

> If you use Poor Man's AR (HCl and Sodium Nitrate) for Silver you will end up with silver coated with silver chloride, not dissolved silver. To dissolve silver use nitric or homemade nitric from sulfuric and a nitrate salt (i.e. Sodium Nitrate).
> 
> I have other methods that do not require nitric acid to clean the copper out of sterling silver. I'm actually currently cleaning a 1.5 pound bar using zero nitirc acid.
> 
> Steve


Thanks Steve, in my post I meant sulfuric + nitrate of soda but being a newbi these are the places where mistakes happen. Also please check out my response in the Help needed, since I'm a potter I maybe able to made some unglazed cups if there a need.
Thanks again Wyndham


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