How we refine silver without cement silver or silver shot

[jeff@performance-construc]

I am really enjoying this forum so much and I appreciate all the information and the help that is provided. So, I wanted to share some tips that we do to make silver refining a little easier.

We no longer make or use cement silver and or silver shot instead we:

1. Carefully sort scarp silver and use only 800 or above silver materials.
2. Clean silver scarp by ceramic ball burnishing and burnishing fluid.
3. Clean small pcs of silver scarp in a up to a 30-liter ultrasonic cleaner.
4. Air dry cleaned silver using a fan. (it's very fast)
5. We melt the cleaned scarp into 45ozt anode bars. (Or make for the size of your basket) then we clean the finished anode bars with ball burnishing before using.
6. We start with the three anode bars placed directly into a double perforated basket setup that has 2 layers of Muslin cloth in the outer basket and 1layer in the smaller anode basket.
7. Add more anode bars as needed during the refining process.
8. Typically using a 19qt stainless steel bowl and our yields are about 10lbs refined silver in max 15 days. (depending on the electrolyte solution you use)
9. Using this process our silver easily hits the three nines+ mark.

• We found that hands down the solid bars much work better that using silver shot and its cleaner and easier to handle.
• Don't use Dacron vacuum cleaner bags for filter material.
• Use a fan to dry your materials rather than heat.
• No need to clean your scarp with chemicals and heat.
• By eliminating all the steps used for making cement silver, we reduce time, costs and all the hassles associated with handling and cleaning up messy waste solutions.

Hope this information is of help or least food for thought.

Jeff

 

[4metals]

Thanks for posting this. Very nice looking bowl system. How often do you harvest Silver from each cell? How long does it take for the Copper to build up enough to require changing the electrolyte? Do you analyze the solution for Silver and add nitric accordingly? How many volts and amps do you run at?

 

[jeff@performance-construc]

We generally clean out the cell every 15 days. During the second week of the refining process, we sometimes harvest silver every day as the cells tend to produce too much silver and we need to continually make more room in the cell. We use 3.5 volts and let the amps run free. We never add nitric, and the full acrylic cover keeps evaporation to a minimum, so we don't need to add distilled water. The oversized cover also lets us move the anode around the cell when the silver starts building up. We run the electrolyte two times if the solution is clear and only once if the solution has a very dark color, it really depends on % scarp silver you are refining. We also want to get the silver to refine in a very thick clumped up way versus the long thin tree like crystal you often see this gets us more weight in the cell.

 

[4metals]

Aside from the fact that your system eats up a lot of floor space compared to a Moebius cell,(which is typical of thum cells) your system is very nice. The 2 most costly pieces are the stainless bowl and the rectifier. How do you rinse your Silver when it comes out of the cell?

 

[Martijn]

We generally clean out the cell every 15 days. During the second week of the refining process, we sometimes harvest silver every day as the cells tend to produce too much silver and we need to continually make more room in the cell. We use 3.5 volts and let the amps run free. We never add nitric, and the full acrylic cover keeps evaporation to a minimum, so we don't need to add distilled water. The oversized cover also lets us move the anode around the cell when the silver starts building up. We run the electrolyte two times if the solution is clear and only once if the solution has a very dark color, it really depends on % scarp silver you are refining. We also want to get the silver to refine in a very thick clumped up way versus the long thin tree like crystal you often see this gets us more weight in the cell.

You can reuse the electrolyte by cleaning with a graphite cathode if i'm correct. Look for Lazersteve's posts about the silver cell and copper nitrate.

 

[Abdoulapapatte]

Vous pouvez réutiliser l'électrolyte en le nettoyant avec une cathode en graphite si j'ai raison. Recherchez les articles de Lazersteve sur la cellule d'argent et le nitrate de cuivre.

can you explain the proces

 

[jeff@performance-construc]

Aside from the fact that your system eats up a lot of floor space compared to a Moebius cell,(which is typical of thum cells) your system is very nice. The 2 most costly pieces are the stainless bowl and the rectifier. How do you rinse your Silver when it comes out of the cell?

Thats a real challenge for sure. I started with one cell years ago as hobby and thanks to Amazon and my love of refining slowly expanded to 20 cells. We have a simple way of washing silver as we use a 2.5-gallon bucket, and we jet a strong stream of distilled water into a that bucket of refined silver while stirring and let the excess rinse water flow over the top. We do this in a sink that captures all the rinse water in 55-gallon drums, and we recycle the rinse water back to clean distilled water. I am attaching a photo of the recycle equipment and our homemade sink setup.

 

[Martijn]

can you explain the proces

Processing Sterling Silver without nitric acid
Read through the thread, there are gems to be found inside. it's only 5 pages.

 

[Swissgoldrefiner]

I am really enjoying this forum so much and I appreciate all the information and the help that is provided. So, I wanted to share some tips that we do to make silver refining a little easier.

We no longer make or use cement silver and or silver shot instead we:

1. Carefully sort scarp silver and use only 800 or above silver materials.
2. Clean silver scarp by ceramic ball burnishing and burnishing fluid.
3. Clean small pcs of silver scarp in a up to a 30-liter ultrasonic cleaner.
4. Air dry cleaned silver using a fan. (it's very fast)
5. We melt the cleaned scarp into 45ozt anode bars. (Or make for the size of your basket) then we clean the finished anode bars with ball burnishing before using.
6. We start with the three anode bars placed directly into a double perforated basket setup that has 2 layers of Muslin cloth in the outer basket and 1layer in the smaller anode basket.
7. Add more anode bars as needed during the refining process.
8. Typically using a 19qt stainless steel bowl and our yields are about 10lbs refined silver in max 15 days. (depending on the electrolyte solution you use)
9. Using this process our silver easily hits the three nines+ mark.

• We found that hands down the solid bars much work better that using silver shot and its cleaner and easier to handle.
• Don't use Dacron vacuum cleaner bags for filter material.
• Use a fan to dry your materials rather than heat.
• No need to clean your scarp with chemicals and heat.
• By eliminating all the steps used for making cement silver, we reduce time, costs and all the hassles associated with handling and cleaning up messy waste solutions.

Hope this information is of help or least food for thought.

Jeff

Why are you cleaning the silver, if you melt it? Usually we dont clean the silver, we directly melt it, which makes some times a lot of fumes.

 

[Martijn]

Why are you cleaning the silver, if you melt it? Usually we dont clean the silver, we directly melt it, which makes some times a lot of fumes.

Because of copper, silver and possibly other base metal solution traces that remain in between the silver crystals. Thats where your fumes come from. Why melt that back in refined pure silver?

 

[Swissgoldrefiner]

Because of copper, silver and possibly other base metal solution traces that remain in between the silver crystals. Thats where your fumes come from. Why melt that back in refined pure silver?

No, i mean, as i understood from his methode is that, he first clean, ultrasonic, etc....and then he melt it.
We do melt it directly. The funmes mostly comes from wax which some knif contain. I know it looks weird, but i will add few picture.
We melt some thimes 200-300 old silver.

 

[Swissgoldrefiner]

Processing Sterling Silver without nitric acid
Read through the thread, there are gems to be found inside. it's only 5 pages.

It's sad that the picture looks missing...

 

[Martijn]

It's sad that the picture looks missing...

Indeed. It's an old post. But very valuable info.

 

[4metals]

Usually we dont clean the silver, we directly melt it, which makes some times a lot of fumes.

Rinsing is critical for pure Silver. The electrolyte has to be rinsed free of the Silver needles. Even after rinsing some of the acidic residue remains. Larger refiners use a spin drier used to dry electroplated parts quickly and the few I know who used plain steel (painted) spin driers replaced them within a few years as they had rusted out from the remaining electrolyte. They replace them with stainless steel spin driers which solves the problem. But it also draws attention to the fact that rinsing alone still leaves electrolyte on the Silver needles.

 

[Martijn]

No, i mean, as i understood from his methode is that, he first clean, ultrasonic, etc....and then he melt it.
We do melt it directly. The funmes mostly comes from wax which some knif contain. I know it looks weird, but i will add few picture.
We melt some thimes 200-300 old silver.

Ah. That's what you mean. I thought the same thing reading that. Dirt would get burned off.

 

[jeff@performance-construc]

No, i mean, as i understood from his methode is that, he first clean, ultrasonic, etc....and then he melt it.
We do melt it directly. The funmes mostly comes from wax which some knif contain. I know it looks weird, but i will add few picture.
We melt some thimes 200-300 old silver.

For us it's important that the scarp silver be ultra clean before refining. We clean all our bulk silver with a vibratory tumbler using ceramic media and small amount of burnishing liquid. Really small scarp silver pcs are cleaned with Ultrasonic both methods are very fast. All cleaned scarp is air dried by a fan. During the melting process we skim off any sludge on the top of the melt before pouring the anode bars. See the photo of a typical very clean sterling silver anode ready for the silver cell.

 

[4metals]

During the melting process we skim off any sludge on the top of the melt before pouring the anode bars.

Do you use any flux while melting the sterling anodes?

 

[jeff@performance-construc]

We normally don't use flux for making the anode bars.

 

[4metals]

We normally don't use flux for making the anode bars.

I have never seen the degree of pre cleaning you subject your scrap to done on a commercial level. But to produce the anodes you have shown, without a flux, says it is worthwhile.

Here is a question for you? Suppose you get in candlesticks or some other sterling which has hollow filled with a waxy filler. How do you process that? Similarly how do you process knives?

 

[4metals]

Most refiners would pass larger objects through one of these machines to make smaller pieces. (Beating a teapot like the one shown with a sledge hammer until it fits into a crucible gets old) Knives are either sliced in a shear to remove the blade or heated so the blade can be pulled free. The knife handles are then shredded to open them up so the inner waxes fall out (often wish full thinking) and then fluxed and melted.