# Quality of silver recovered using electrlytic and iron repla



## Gray3287 (Feb 3, 2014)

Hi All,
I have a large quantity of recovered silver from the medical x ray industry, my question is this, the silver that i have recovered from the electrolysis methods is a grey colour and has always smelted well in my homemade charcoal blast furnace, however i also have a large quantity of blacker more sand like silver which i think came from the iron replacement method, is the silver the same in content, or will i need to process/clean this first before smelting, or can I Just put it in the crucible with some borax and smelt?


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## Lou (Feb 3, 2014)

Not necessarily the same purity. Iron and silver aren't very miscible so judicious use of borax should be the ticket.


Get into a block and I'd buy it.


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## Gray3287 (Feb 5, 2014)

Cheers for that, on closer inspection this silver did in fact come from a cathode of one of my silver recovery systems, howver it does have a very different consistency to other silver i have recovered as i say its very black unlike the grey metallic stuff i have recoverd and smelted, also i tried to so how it would react in a beaker of distilled water and it did not seem to settle well, ie it just looks like a beaker of black sludge, i got 4 kilos of this stuff, and i iknow it is a high content as i have used some ag testing papers and its loaded, any ideas for further processing or shall i just melt it as is?


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## Lou (Feb 5, 2014)

Melt it with a lot of flux. If it is high in sulfide (which usually settles nicely), then you'll want to use iron to convert it in the melt.

Best advice: melt a small sample first to determine if you're getting the recovery. Bust up the slag and look for prill hold up.

Cheers,


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