# Silver Goblet Melt



## TBarrow (Dec 15, 2011)

Alright, here goes my first real precious metal topic. Go easy on me. Photos are all at the end of this post.

One of my items to refine is an old broken goblet that looks like silver, but may be not. It doesn't look anything like any pewter I have ever seen. It has absolutely no markings other than some witchcraft looking symbols on it. Whatever it is, it is solid alloy through and through (I've cut it, filed it, scraped it). Since I have some old karat gold jewelry that I plan on inquarting, I thought that if I had this goblet in the form of 'shot', it would be easy to measure up the amount needed for adding to the inquartation to get to the right proportions. I assumed that whatever base metals were in the alloy, they were good enough for inquarting.

So I got out one of my spiffy new fused silica melting dishes and put a nice even coating of borax on it using my equally spiffy new Oxy-Propane torch. The goblet is much too large to melt in one dish, so I just melted through the stem above the base, and put the base piece and stem section in the dish. The torch worked great, and I soon had the hunk of alloy up to glowing. I kept it there for a little while since it started smoking, and I wanted to make sure any burnable surface impurities were incinerated away.

After that, I got more agressive with the heat, and soon the metal was melting around the edges. No problems up until the point that the whole blob was coming together in the center of the dish. That's when the fun started.

As it puddled into one big mass, LOTS of white smoke started coming off the metal, then big bluish flashes of light and flame in the smoke (similar to the flashing of an arc welder). I decided to keep heating and stirring the metal with the torch flame, thinking this must just be more impurities in the alloy. All the smoke was rising up and away from me, so I wasn't breathing any of it. I did this for about 20 more seconds until the blue flashes and smoke just got too big for me to feel comfortable, and then I poured the contents of the dish into cold water. At that point, I just wanted to get the operation stopped, so I didn't get much 'shot' out of it, mostly just a mass of tangled solidified metal. No longer silver, but a goldish silver copper color. The borax in the melting dish had much black, brown, and bright red colors in it.

I have one of the small shot pellets digesting in milliliter or so of Nitric in a test tube. The solution is turning a milky pale blue, and the pellet is getting darker brown, but not getting smaller. My intention is to put a few drops of HCL in the solution after it quits working on the pellet, to see if I get any silver chloride cheesy mass. If there is still a chunk after the digest, I'll try digesting it in AR, and test for gold, but I would think that would be highly unlikely.

So everyone look at the pictures below, tell me what an idiot I am, and let me know what you think on whether I should keep trying to melt this goblet, or quit wasting my time. I'm a big boy, I can take it. 8) 

Thanks,
Todd


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## tlcarrig (Dec 15, 2011)

Did it ever cross your mind to test this piece before you did anything to it so that you would know what to do. Trying what you did without knowing is a good way to get dead real quick.


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## niteliteone (Dec 15, 2011)

Not sure what you got in that mess. :shock: 

But you are not an *IDIOT* either.  

Now you are educated in why it is recomended to *ALWAYS* test the piece before starting any other proceedures on it.

Good luck
Tom C.


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## qst42know (Dec 15, 2011)

Stop playing and read, "Testing precious metals" by Hoke

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=7953

This is also handy.

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=1765


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## TBarrow (Dec 15, 2011)

tlcarrig said:


> Did it ever cross your mind to test this piece before you did anything to it so that you would know what to do.


Yes. The assumptions I made about the base metals came from tests with 50/50 nitric in a small test tube using the tiny bit of filings and scrapings I produced (I have no Schwerter's). The results were very similar to those in one of niteliteone's posts on bracelets which were magnetic, although my goblet is not magnetic at all. I was hoping that doing more experimenting on shot-sized pieces would give me some better understanding. I should have probably cut a piece off with a jeweler's saw instead of melting. 



> Trying what you did without knowing is a good way to get dead real quick.



You're right. And I don't like being dead real quick OR real slow.


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## glondor (Dec 15, 2011)

My colour vision is not the best but I would say it looks like brass to me. As for the fireworks and smoke, I don't know. I have never melted silver plated brass.( If it was plated. ) There are metals that would give fireworks like magnesium. The red in the dish is curious as well. 

Do your tests and let us know how it goes.


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## TBarrow (Dec 15, 2011)

niteliteone said:


> Not sure what you got in that mess. :shock:
> 
> But you are not an *IDIOT* either.
> 
> ...



Thanks Tom, 

Now that I have some small pieces, I'll do more testing before proceeding any further. The solutions I made from nitric on the few filings I had looked just like what you showed and described in the post you made on bracelets. Actually thought I was going in the right direction (wrong!) by melting it into shot to do more testing on slightly larger pieces, and to use for inquarting later.

The jury is still out on the idiot thing. 

Todd


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## TBarrow (Dec 15, 2011)

qst42know said:


> Stop playing and read, "Testing precious metals" by Hoke
> 
> http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=7953
> 
> ...



Will do - Thank you for the links.


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## TBarrow (Dec 15, 2011)

glondor said:


> My colour vision is not the best but I would say it looks like brass to me. As for the fireworks and smoke, I don't know. I have never melted silver plated brass.( If it was plated. ) There are metals that would give fireworks like magnesium. The red in the dish is curious as well.
> 
> Do your tests and let us know how it goes.



Hi Glondor,

Now that you say that about brass... The scraping, cutting and filing I did was on the upper part of the thing, could they have plated a brass piece for the pedestal base and soldered it to the stem? It also melted fairly easily. I've handled a lot of brass, and this base piece didn't feel that heavy.


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## glondor (Dec 16, 2011)

I believe an equal volume of silver is heavier than an equal volume of brass, so if it does not feel heavy enough to be brass......


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## TBarrow (Dec 16, 2011)

glondor said:


> I believe an equal volume of silver is heavier than an equal volume of brass, so if it does not feel heavy enough to be brass......



My brain is around here somewhere. I'll let you know when I find it.  

Update on the pellet in nitric:

Reaction has ceased. Solution started out as pale blue, now looks like the color of dark spinach. Pellet is now actually much smaller. I'm going to filter the solution, and put the remaining piece of the pellet in a litte more fresh nitric to see if it is going to completely digest, then test the current solution for silver.

Todd


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## Harold_V (Dec 16, 2011)

I dunno. Has this thing been discussed properly? I'm short of time, but I read the comments. Maybe someone already said what needs to be said. 

Are you familiar with zinc? It's the constituent used to make brass. Not bronze---brass. It burns with a vengeance, and puts out white smoke the same way (exactly as you described). Also, often little light weight strings of white ------that float about, condensing out of the smoke. That's what you had going---you were burning zinc from the brass item you melted. 

Learn to test. Melt nothing unless you know what you're melting. Some of these things can kill you---cadmium being one of them.

Harold


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## Geo (Dec 16, 2011)

TBarrow,

silver test solution is relatively cheap buying it from Ebay. i bought the nine piece test kit for gold/platinum/silver for $14.99 and got it in three days. so far its paid for itself many times. if you need only silver test solution you can get that as well even cheaper.


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## philddreamer (Dec 16, 2011)

I second what Geo said. 
I just got my 12 bottles for silver testing last week from these folks.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160680245643

I gave a bottle to 3 of my friends that I buy silver from. An early Christmas gift! :mrgreen: 

Phil


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## TBarrow (Dec 16, 2011)

Thanks Harold, for not completely ripping me a new one. Which would be more than warranted in this particular instance.

This is a case of me reading constantly on this forum (and elsewhere), and allowing myself to feel much too confident because of my newly acquired knowledge. Newly acquired doesn't mean 'complete', and reading 'a lot' is not the same as reading 'enough'. Focusing heavily on rapidly learning a process doesn't always reveal all of the dangers to an overly eager student. 

Thanks Geo and Phil for the ebay suggestions and link. 

Todd


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## Harold_V (Dec 17, 2011)

TBarrow said:


> Thanks Harold, for not completely ripping me a new one. Which would be more than warranted in this particular instance.


We learn by doing, and, hopefully, with help from others. You're new, and you're inquisitive and excited. It's easy to make assumptions, especially when you hope for them to be as you wish. You'll get better and better about that, assuming you're not a dreamer, and are capable of dealing with reality. You'll eventually be able to just *know* when something isn't what you think it is. You will then bolster your hunch by testing. 

You could have eliminated this item as being valueless with one simple test---- a drop of nitric acid. You'll come to know that with experience. Mean time, spend some time getting familiar with testing, and the expected reactions. If you get them straight in your head, they will serve you well infinitely. 

Harold


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## TBarrow (Dec 17, 2011)

Thanks again Harold,


Harold_V said:


> It's easy to make assumptions, especially when you hope for them to be as you wish. You'll get better and better about that, assuming you're not a dreamer, and are capable of dealing with reality.


Lost my dreamer status 30 years ago when I started my first business. Learned quickly that reality is reality!


Harold_V said:


> You could have eliminated this item as being valueless with one simple test---- a drop of nitric acid. You'll come to know that with experience. Mean time, spend some time getting familiar with testing, and the expected reactions. If you get them straight in your head, they will serve you well infinitely.


Sure hope you're right, and I'll work toward gaining that experience! Also, part of my interest is in the general determination of the percentage composition of different metals in alloys, so while the melting of this item was a pretty stupid thing to do, I can at least get some learning from the remains of the bigger error. In that regard, the object may not have any precious metal value, but the lessons learned will be priceless. 

Todd


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