# CEMENT SILVER



## Puff501 (May 17, 2020)

I have done my first karat scrap refining and it came out pretty well.
I have recovered the silver I used to inquart as cement silver dropped with copper.
I will be doing another refining and I am wondering if when I add silver to the next inquart, if I can use my cement silver for the inquartation by weight.

Will inquarted silver lose weight once it is melted? 
Or, if I make silver shot with say 100 grams of dry cement, will I get 100 grams of shot?

Same question for gold too while I'm here.
I have my recovered pure gold in dry powder form at 63 grams. How much weight if any will it lose when I melt it into a bar or shot? 

Reason I ask is it will save me melt steps if I don't have to make silver shot and just use my cement silver and I'm thinking of just saving my gold as powder for now until I have a bunch and do a bigger melt all at once.

Thanks,
Steve


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## butcher (May 17, 2020)

When metals are cemented from the solution they are metals ( not salts of metals) just in powdered form, so a gram of silver cement melted will be a gram of silver after melting.

Metal salts or many precipitants are not metals, and in the case of silver or gold chlorides you can also have losses in the melt as the gases of these salts can carry off metals in the smoke of the melts.
Silver chloride is about 75% silver metal.
Gold chloride is about 50% gold metal.


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## Puff501 (May 17, 2020)

Thanks Butcher
So I have the gold powder I have recovered from aqua regia solution which was dropped with SMB.
Is this gold chloride or is it gold metal? I hope it is the metal.


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## jarlowski1 (May 17, 2020)

It would be gold powder (metallic form). I would recommend you slow down a bit and study more here on the forum until you understand what the processes are and what you are doing. Make sure you are dealing with the waste properly and make sure you are protecting yourself and others from what you are doing.


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## Puff501 (May 17, 2020)

I have been reading on this forum for 3 months now and learning all I can and I know I have only scratched the surface. 
I wear safety glasses and gloves, nitrile or leather depending what I'm doing and all my waste has been saved in a 5 gallon bucket for now. 
I am not going to burn the house down or create an unnatural disaster.
Thank you for the info.


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## jarlowski1 (May 17, 2020)

Puff501 said:


> I have been reading on this forum for 3 months now and learning all I can and I know I have only scratched the surface.
> I wear safety glasses and gloves, nitrile or leather depending what I'm doing and all my waste has been saved in a 5 gallon bucket for now.
> I am not going to burn the house down or create an unnatural disaster.
> Thank you for the info.




Reading is one thing understanding what you read is quite another. Your question about the powder you precipitated with smb tells me you didn't understand what you did or what you have and that in chemistry can be a huge mistake. I am not trying to put you down I am simply pointing out something you need to work on in order to keep doing this safely. Anyone can copy youtube or read somethings here on the forum and duplicate it but as I have said that is the most dangerous thing you can do. There are chemical reactions associated with this hobby that are very unstable. If you mix the wrong chemicals together it can go boom. So don't be offended when I or someone else tells you that you need to study some more. Its because we don't want to see you or anyone else hurt. Good luck


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## Puff501 (May 17, 2020)

First I started this thread about my cement silver and gold powder.

Then Butcher answered me with, 
"Metal salts or many precipitants are not metals, and in the case of silver or gold chlorides you can also have losses in the melt as the gases of these salts can carry off metals in the smoke of the melts.
Silver chloride is about 75% silver metal.
Gold chloride is about 50% gold metal."

This confused me. I wasn't talking about chlorides or salts as I thought my gold powder was actual metal, but his answer referred to chlorides and salts and I know that these are not pure metal. 
I thought I knew what I had but his reply made me question myself.

My follow up was just to verify what I already thought, that my gold precipitate was pure metal gold.


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## butcher (May 18, 2020)

Puff501,
Metals dissolved in a solution are no longer metals but become ions of the metals or salts of metals and salts or ions of the acid that dissolved them. The metals, when dissolved their individual atoms, give up or share electrons with the acid that dissolved them.

We can precipitate salts of metals from a solution, such as when we add chlorides to an ionic solution of silver nitrate ions AgNO3, the silver chloride is insoluble in the nitrate solution and it falls to the bottom of the vessel as a salt of silver or AgCl, here the metal is still a salt of silver in an ionic form whose weight is composed of about 75% silver.

If the silver in this same nitrate solution was cemented from solution using copper, the copper metal gives up electrons to the silver ions, so the copper goes into solution as ions, while the silver atoms gain the electrons and become metal silver powder or clusters of silver atoms.

When gold is precipitated from solution, the gold ions gain electrons from the reducing agent to become atoms of gold, the reducing agent giving the gold ion's electrons which in turn breaks the golds bond it previously held with the chloride ions in solution, so the gold precipitates as metal and not a salt of gold...


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## Martijn (May 18, 2020)

You are well on your way. Simpe answers lead to simple views of dangerous things. Once you understand the reply butcher gave, you will have the answer to you question(s)
It's a way to make you think about it and get you to study. 
The first three months got you to level one. And you will never stop learning, believe me. Read hoke again and you will understand more than before. And keep going back there. 
The door's open, follow the directions so you dont get lost. 
Have fun & be safe.

Edit: if you leave chlorides or nitrates in your powder by not rinsing well, you could loose gold when melting. That may be why he explained it that way?


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## Puff501 (May 21, 2020)

After precipitating with SMB, I let it settle for 3 days and then filtered through a glass funnel with fluted 102 paper, then rinsed with HCL 2 times and then 2 times with distilled water. Let it dry. This is what I got.

https://i.ibb.co/SByrdjm/0513201251-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/LkN3YyH/0507201743-1.jpg


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## butcher (May 21, 2020)

Puff501,
Well it sure does not look like silver, and it sure does not look like cement.

Nice looking metal there.

It looks like for the few months you have been studying has been well worth your time, and you are going to be seeing some shinning results.


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## nickton (Aug 24, 2020)

I guess we're not really talking about silver here then.


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## Shark (Aug 24, 2020)

Puff501 said:


> My follow up was just to verify what I already thought, that my gold precipitant was pure metal gold.



Here is some of the confusion for me.

precipitate = (Chemistry) To cause (a solid substance) to be separated from a solution.

precipitant = (Chemistry) A substance that causes a precipitate to form when it is added to a solution.

Your precipitant would be your smb while your precipitate would be your gold powders. While your gold is an actual powder, it is still a finely divided metal. So finely divided that it does not reflect light the same way a coin or karat gold jewelry will. This is why the precipitate looks brownish.

edit: You can rub a small bit of the brownish powder on a hard surface with some pressure and it will show a gold colored streak.

Sorry for seeming to be a jerk, but sometimes a simple word being misused can throw things out of whack. And I am already far enough out of whack,  

Very nice looking powders!


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## Puff501 (Sep 8, 2020)

Thank you,
I see the error, have corrected the statement, and will try not to make this one again.
I try to be accurate with my posts, however my humanity makes me less than perfect.

Steve


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## Palladium (Sep 8, 2020)

We are all less than perfect sir, it's what makes us human and how we learn!


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## Shark (Sep 8, 2020)

Sorry for being so long in replying it has been a mad house around here lately. Palladium is right, we all are less than perfect and we can all learn from such things. If everything worked perfect every time, we most likely would never learn anything.


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