# Clarification of silver plate refining costs



## Anonymous (Nov 22, 2010)

I have a background in silverware and none whatsoever in refining - so I know how much silver was originally plated onto flatware but I have no idea what the cost is to remove it. So my question is simply what is the cost to remove the silverplate from say 10,000 silverplate forks? Furthermore, what is the standard method for doing this - does the technology exist to do this effectively (ie recover the majority of silver on the fork)? Simply put, how much would it cost me to recover the silver from 10,000 silverplate forks and what percent of the silver on the forks could I expect to recover? Which refining company would be able to help me with this?


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## goldsilverpro (Nov 22, 2010)

I may be wrong, but I doubt if you can find a refiner that would accept that job. There is really no good way that I know of to process this material. However, I did come up with an electrolytic cyanide method, years ago, that worked pretty well. To use it, you would either have to rack the pieces individually or use a barrel plater. A second possibility is to use the sulfuric stripper - however, you'll have to figure out how to get the silver out of the sulfuric. Thirdly, you could use hot 95 sulfuric/5 nitric, but that is dangerous, slow, and probably expensive.

Here's a list of the various standard specifications of silverplate from the Butts and Coxe silver book. I don't know whether the items are stamped this way, or not, but I think many are.

Half plate - 1 tr.oz. of silver per gross (144 pieces) of teaspoons
Standard plate - 2 oz/gross
Double plate - 4 oz/gross
Triple plate - 6 oz/gross
Quadruple plate - 8 oz/gross
Federal Specification - 9 oz/gross

The silver thickness on these ranges from .00015" to .00125". At a $27 silver spot, that figures from $0.022 to $0.187 per square inch of surface area.



*BTW*, here's an easy new way to convert plating thicknesses to dollars per square inch.

For Gold: (plating thickness in inches) x 10.18 x spot price = $ value/square inch
For silver: (plating thickness in inches) x 5.53 x spot price = $ value/square inch

Why this works:

Please note that the plating thickness in inches = the number of cubic inches of one square inch. Example: .00015" x 1" x 1" = .00015 cu.in.

A cu.in. of gold weighs 10.18 tr.oz. A cu.in. of silver weighs 5.53 tr.oz.

In practice, the values run slightly less, since the density of plating is always slightly less than the theoretical density, due to alloying ingredients, inclusions, and/or porosity.


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## Anonymous (Nov 22, 2010)

What about 1,000,000 plated forks? You know what you are doing and I have the material so why don't we work together on this?


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## goldsilverpro (Nov 22, 2010)

silverscrape said:


> What about 1,000,000 plated forks? You know what you are doing and I have the material so why don't we work together on this?



Explain what you have in mind more fully. PM me if you want.


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## adarnametal (Feb 15, 2011)

This seems like a Nigerian scam :lol: 1 000 000 silverplated forks??
Where did you find all these?
I am starting trading silverplate now, I will tell you in one month if it was profitable!


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