ssharktu17
Well-known member
Say you wanted to make 100 exactly 1oz ingots at once how would you do it? Most videos I see are just people guessing on their pours and coming out with 100 different sized ingots.
Seems incredibly tedious. What about just melting the shot in the graphite mold? like baking cookies lol.The best advice I would have for any ingot, is to just pre-weigh your grains/shot and then pour just that. 1 troy oz. bars are small and finicky though. But if you weight out 1 troy oz. and you pour it all (I usually add a gram or two extra due to melt loss), then you have a 1 troy oz. bar. Be mindful of oxygen absorbance, molten silver can absorb 20x it's volume in oxygen and when it off-gasses when the silver freezes, it leave the silver and makes it look like crap. Best to use a reducing flame, if you're using a oxy-(anything) torch.
A mint would pour them into a strip, use a rolling-mill to get down to an exact thickness (while doing a lot of annealing between rolls, and then using a punching machine to cut blanks. Of course these are no longer really ingots, but blanks. This is how they make coins, although the blanks don't have to be round.
That would be cool but impractical on any scale. Ya I’ve seen those videos they are just doing random weight pours.As an aside, the perfectionist in me wants to pour silver ingot bars and then use a milling machine (like a Sherline, Sherline Vertical Milling Machines – Sherline Products), to mill them down to exact tolerances while having a logo/size/material embossed on the silver that isn't cut away. Needless to say, this is likely both silly and unnecessary. But I think it's a cool idea. It would give me exact masses on each bar, and they would all be identical.
It doesn't actually take that long, I was able to pour twelve 250g bars in short order. The silver shot was weighed out into glass beakers then one bar was poured, the beaker was used to put the next batch into the furnace crucible. Set a clock for 15 minutes to allow the silver shot to melt, pour, repeat. Managed to pour them all in a few hours.Seems incredibly tedious. What about just melting the shot in the graphite mold? like baking cookies lol.
You make a big
12 isn’t bad but say I wanted to melt a 1 thousand and bar and pour 1000 1oz ingots.It doesn't actually take that long, I was able to pour twelve 250g bars in short order. The silver shot was weighed out into glass beakers then one bar was poured, the beaker was used to put the next batch into the furnace crucible. Set a clock for 15 minutes to allow the silver shot to melt, pour, repeat. Managed to pour them all in a few hours.
I also poured these to make anode bars and to practice pouring (a skill I have a lot of work to do to get better at, so practice makes perfect) for my silver cell.
1ozt are just more practical and have much higher premiums. If it came to it carrying around a 10ozt bar is not practical.Well, my first question would be, why not pour one hundred 10oz ingots or ten 100oz ingots? As these are more manageable to pour with your amount of volume. Although, I'm sure there is a reason for why you want to make such small ingots. What I want you to understand is that without a sizable investment in equipment, you really just have a lot of tedious work on your hands.
And the reason they carry a higher premium I pointed out above.1ozt are just more practical and have much higher premiums. If it came to it carrying around a 10ozt bar is not practical.
Yup im thinking something like this. Im guessing a tray of 1oztFrom what I have seen with the big refiners the metal is melted into shot , dried fully , weighed exactly and put into I believe graphite molds and fed into a belt furnace,this is usually for larger bars as the cost of molds will be excessive for small bars, these as pointed out are usually stamped out as the finish proves.
I believe they have a higher premium simply because they are more practical and also especially because the lower price point allows more competition from bidders.And the reason they carry a higher premium I pointed out above.
Also this could add up to the "why". But production cost is not negligeable. As it was said, bigger bars are made from uniform pre-made shot, which is carefully weighed and placed into graphite molds with lids, heated in some inert gas atmosphere furnance to prepare raw ingots, that are removed from the mold when cool, re-weighed, and stamped/"minted" to shape the metal nicely.I believe they have a higher premium simply because they are more practical and also especially because the lower price point allows more competition from bidders.
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