# First cementation. It's been a while.



## zenophryk (May 28, 2022)

So I started getting interested in this stuff about 12 years ago. And as is my MO, I'll jump into something and then I either get busy with work or something else interesting pops up, or I just procrastinate.
About 6 or 7 years ago I dissolved some sterling into nitric, and it was a nice pretty blue color, and then I forgot about it. 
About a week ago I took some parts from a residential circuit breaker and dissolved those in a 50/50 distilled water/HNO3. I started with one of the parts which didn't have the actual contact pad on it, and that yielded a blue liquid as expected from the copper content. but there was still some available nitric in the solution, so I threw in the other contact parts. They used up the rest of the nitric and didn't dissolve completely, but the solution turned green. These other contacts did look a little different, but must have had a different metal in it's alloy. I poured the green solution out and started the remaining bits in a 80/20 solution. this only left the contact pads behind in a blue solution.
So back to the flask from 6 or 7 years ago. at the bottom of this flask were a bunch of translucent crystals. I'm thinking these a silver nitrate crystals? Formed as water evaporated from the solution and the concentration went to super saturated? I decanted the blue liquid into a beaker. washed the crystals with Distilled water and put those in a different beaker. I added the green solution above and put in some copper to cement out the silver. So this went well and I have a bunch of silver, and probably whatever was causing the green color in the solution mixed in with it. I just added some more copper since the first one was completely consumed.

So some questions for people. Of course I don't want to loose any values, but at the moment I'm doing it for fun. What other stuff is likely in my cementation? I'm guessing the quantities will be so small that it won't be worth fussing over? I'm likely going to build a silver cell to purify the cementation after cornflaking it. Mostly so I can grow silver crystals, it just looks so cool.

Also in these 11 or 12 years I have been amassing things in the hope of recovering and refining the gold later. I just tore down about 200 HDDs and I still have about 10 pounds of RAM to trim and depopulate. But it seemed like there is a lot of silver around and that it might be an easy and fun place to start

Any comments and criticisms are very welcome


----------



## nickvc (May 29, 2022)

When you dissolve a mix of metals it’s very hard to know exactly what is in solution and color isn’t really a good way to guess or theorise what’s there.
If you look at the reactivity series of metals you can have a better indication of what will cement using copper .


----------



## Lightspeed (May 30, 2022)

get yourself a fresh batch of stannous chloride going asap, there is palladium in HDD so you will need it, get yourself some DMG too, you will need it to strip the solution of palladium.


----------



## g_axelsson (May 30, 2022)

Palladium is one metal that is sometimes found in relay contact points. Even a small amount of palladium can turn a copper nitrate solution to a green tint. It will also cement out together with the silver on copper. Another clue is if the solution turns blue without any green tint after the silver is cemented out.

There are other metals that could turn copper nitrate green (for example iron) but those doesn't cement out on copper.

As said above, a good test for palladium in solution is DMG (Di Methyl Glyoxim).

Göran


----------

