The most important thing when cleaning up crystals from a silver cell (also called needles) is to rinse them well and dry them.
However the needles are tough to dry because the rinse water tends to cling to the needles and if you just heat them to dry them, you are drying onto them whatever contamination was in the rinse water.
I have always suggested spin drying to large producers because a spin dryer spins the water off with centripetal force effectively drying the parts. A commercial spin dryer also heats the load so the needles come out totally dry.
Now I know a lot of you are rolling your eyes saying the dryer will cost more than the Silver I refine in a year in my little stainless bowl cell. That 4metals guy never recommends the cheap way out! However I have helped labs and refiners that do not have production Silver cells make small cells to refine Silver for their fire assay parting. And they do not have to invest in a heated spin dryer.
To the rescue is a small inexpensive spin dryer (not heated unfortunately) which will effectively spin off that stubborn water film that remains and drys on the needles. It looks like this.
View attachment 61304
This is a spin dryer for salads and vegetables. The slits on these need some modification which is done by hot gluing fine polypro greenhouse bug screening into a bowl shape to fit in this spinner. Basically a mesh basket that just slips in and out.
The fine screen insert effectively keeps in all but the finest of fine pieces of Silver. And the pieces that do make it through are not lost, they are sitting on the bottom of the bowl.
After you have rinsed your silver needles, I prefer to pour a final hot distilled water rinse over the needles, put them in the spinner, and pump it a few times to spin off the water that remains. The fine mesh liner is handy because it comes right out of the spinner so I fill the screen with the silver, pour the hot final rinse over it, and put it in the spinner to be centrifugally dried.
I have dried a kilo of needles this way and proceeded to melt them in an assay furnace and pour shot for use in the assay process. If storing them as needles, I would dry them with a heat lamp and store them in a large mouth glass jar.