Best Ball Mill Media for Plated Silver Removal

[Goldfinger4]

Nickel is the most frequent cause of contact allergies. That's why nickel is less and little used for steel alloys which have contact with skin.
Maybe you are immune to that
Did you test your results for purity? I'm interested in how much % silver your dust contains.

 

[Fever]

Haven't had the time! I have accumulated a nice amount of material, but have yet to do any chemistry. Work is crazy for me right now, but hopefully soon....

 

[cbarney522]

Hi Everyone. I've been a longtime lurker and am going to start being a more active participant on this fantastic site. I started getting into metal recovery during a period of unemployment several years ago, and it's become something of a hobby. I started with disassembling several hundred PC's that I got for free, recovering gold from edge cards, and other components. From there, I branched out into gold-plated and silver-plated metalware, and even pewter.

I had pretty good success stripping gold from 40 lbs of gold-plated utensils last year using a sulfuric acid stripping cell. However, it was messy, dangerous and labor intensive. I have a large quantity of silver and gold-plated metalware (vases, trays, cups, bowls, pitchers) that I want to strip using some sort of abrasive method. In my opinion, this method would be safer, more cost-effective, and more scalable to large volumes.

I've read several postings from members who have used ball mills to abrade silver plating. My thinking is that a vibratory tumbler might work better and use less electrical power, but I can't find anyone who has actually run experiments on one.

My idea is to use a shop guillotine to cut up silver-plated metalware into small pieces. I will then place them into a vibratory tumbler with an abrasive media, run it with a water circulator, and slowly abrade the silver plating from the metalware. With proper design, I'm thinking that I can get a lot of the silver to accumulate in a goose neck of the water circulation system. I would run batches separately for gold-plated items.

Does anyone have any experience using a vibratory tumbler to remove silver plating?

 

[rusty]

Thanks for the input Rusty. I thought about sandblast, but since I already have the ball mill, and plenty of time, I thought I'd go that route. I also think the powders will be easier to collect by just dumping out my cylinder, which is tapered, into a vessel for later use. I would think the sandblast method would encourage lots of particle dispersion all about the machine, and may prove difficult to remove entirely. But, both methods should produce similar results.

I agree on the Zirconium. It's not cheap, but I believe the initial costs will be offset by the abrasive's longevity.

Thanks,

Fever

Separating the abraded silver could be as simple as installing a cyclone. The more expensive professional sandblasting cabinets will already have a cyclone installed.

A cyclone is basically a pneumatic centrifuge.

The attached file is for making a large tumbler from old old tractor tire, I've seen where one fellow in Greendale BC actually inverted the tire having the lugs inside. He uses the tumbler for deburring parts.