Old container of sodium dichromate

[Auggie]

I have an old container of sodium dichromate that is in crystal form but all the crystals are caked together. The stuff is very hard inside the bottle. The bottle is one of those old see-thru reddish type glass(?) bottles with a metal cap, so it wasn't an airtight seal or whatever seal it did have broke down over time.

Did this react with air or perhaps fumes from other nearby bottles? This was part of a box of various substances I picked up from a company that was going out of business. There was a bottle of fuming nitric in there that was seeping out veeeeery slowly over time. It causes some nearby bottle caps to rust including this one but it didn't eat through it as it did with another bottle.

Can this be rehabilitated and used for silver testing? I have no experience with something like this. Thanks in advance for your insight and experience.

 

[Harold_V]

Can this be rehabilitated and used for silver testing? I have no experience with something like this. Thanks in advance for your insight and experience.

In my opinion, yes, it can be used for testing silver. Using a porcelain spatula, simply scrape away at the hardened sodium dichromate, which most likely will be reduced to small bits once again, maybe even crystals. You need very little to make a small quantity of Schwerter's solution, so it shouldn't take much effort. Were it mine, I'd leave the balance alone until I needed it. No sense spending time on something that may have to be redone in the future.

Harold