# Scrap Costume Jewelry



## adam_mizer (Jan 13, 2011)

First time beginners run!
I did a run of scrap costume jewelry in a de-electroplate cell.

Started with near 6 pound from a purchase. 
A small amount was to be gold filled, and the blank board was still 1/2 covered with what was supposed to be 50 time overplate test.

At least 1 pound of jewelry was removed being plastics, plastic beads, wood inlays, a few pieces of faceted glass or maybe small stones, some pieces of jade, a tiny piece of turquoise, and some non-goldplated stuff.

First I ran a cutlery set fairly large pieces too, with large service spoons and forks etc, plus over large knife's/fork's/spoons , a gold plated set that comes in its own storage box maybe a set for 4 people. To my surprise it was maybe 10 seconds or less per piece and they were done. Nice looking plated appearance was removed almost instant, meaning there was barely anything here plated on the cutlery.

I ran the 50 time over-plate board and this took 4 of my 6 leads to run 10-15 minutes at least, I wasn't really counting it was just sizzling away at the surface. 
The large pile of scrap took a long time to run because I was running pins in another de-plate cell at the same time. 
Once in a while I would throw many pieces in a copper basket and it did deplate. Again amazing as I walked through and connected each lead to a piece it was non-stop very fast because the stuff deplated instantly in seconds but there was so much of it, a straight through repetition process.

Now I decided to try what was supposed to be gold filled and some bracelet and necklace stuff that said 14kt Italian on it. Looking up this Italian 14kt I find stuff thats supposed to be silver with gold plate that looked the same as what I had. Maybe I don't know gold-filled very well but this stuff went pretty fast.

Apparently there is probably some low quality gold filled left in there and some piece's of silver for another day.
Still need to become aquanted with the silver and gold-filled scrap.

Also there was an interesting happening as I was going along deplating I looked in my scrap-drop water filled container and noticed some sizzling action in there. There was a lot of variety of base metal I'm sure. Picked out a couple pieces that seemed like pewter I guess and these were causing the sizzling as a reaction to what I don't know.

Still working on a small amount of powder right now almost finished processing to add to the 1.8gram I did get from this ordeal. 
Okay maybe I got 2.4 to 2.6 grams from this(NO). (Edit 1.8+0.3=2.1)

The sulphuric was filtered once maybe too fast but you know thats slow anyway. Notice the color is still dark so maybe in that amount there is barely over a gram locked up for now and 1/3rd of that sulphuric belonged to the small cell and the other 2/3rd's belongs to the large cell.

With that in mind from 6 pounds or purchased costume jewelry, a cutlery set, a nice plated board, and a little gold-filled stuff yielded a fair approximation would be less than 3 grams of powder, not melt yet.
Will recheck wash material once more. Possibly 1 ounce .925 silver, maybe another run when I can see low quality gold filled better.
Pretty sure I didn't waste anything.

Thats my first and last purchase of costume jewelry and plated cutlery!


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## Barren Realms 007 (Jan 13, 2011)

If you have a tall narrow container put your acid in it and let it settle for a couple of days and then siphon off the acid and see if you missed some of your gold in your filtering. Put some plastic over the top of the container to keep it from absorbing water. Good job there.


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## adam_mizer (Jan 13, 2011)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> If you have a tall narrow container put your acid in it and let it settle for a couple of days and then siphon off the acid and see if you missed some of your gold in your filtering. Put some plastic over the top of the container to keep it from absorbing water. Good job there.



Excellent idea!
Will keep my eye's open for a suitable container, thats on my list.


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## Barren Realms 007 (Jan 13, 2011)

adam_mizer said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > If you have a tall narrow container put your acid in it and let it settle for a couple of days and then siphon off the acid and see if you missed some of your gold in your filtering. Put some plastic over the top of the container to keep it from absorbing water. Good job there.
> ...



Pickle jar or the like.


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