The granulated silver looks like the result of not enough rinses on your silver cement and the nitric fuming during your melt depositing base metal nitrates onto the surface of the silver. If you are using it to inquart more karat scrap I wouldn't worry too much about a little gold or the colour of the silver it will clean up next batch, if you process white gold alloys and the silver starts to look a slight grey colour it could be PGMs for which you need to run a silver cell or dissolve it all in nitric convert the silver to chloride filter and then cement the PGMs out.
recovery of silver from karat gold, what happened?
- Thread starter Galaxy419
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upcyclist
Well-known member
Silversmiths call that staining on your silver shot firescale. Specifically, it's copper oxides, so your cemented silver has some copper contamination as others have said. One way to avoid some of that contamination is to remove your cementing copper, then add a bit more nitric to your solution. It will preferentially dissolve any remaining copper before it digests your silver (see Reactivity Table of Metals).
Like they said, though--if you're just going to use it for future inquartation, don't worry about it. Silver is preferred for inquartation by most, but really it's about having one quarter gold, three quarters more-reactive-than-gold
Oh, one last question:
Like they said, though--if you're just going to use it for future inquartation, don't worry about it. Silver is preferred for inquartation by most, but really it's about having one quarter gold, three quarters more-reactive-than-gold
Oh, one last question:
What? Are those two things connected, that you thought 3 more grams of silver would make your gold crumble? What do you mean by crumble?Galaxy419 said:
Galaxy419
Well-known member
Sorry poor choice of words I didn't want finely divided particles.
upcyclist
Well-known member
Ah, okay. I don't think a 2% change in silver content will change that either way, and actually you DO want finely divided particles after the nitric leach. They're easier for the AR to digest.
--Eric
--Eric
Galaxy419
Well-known member
Thank you for the advice I still have a lot to learn
In honesty I never worried about the gold from inquarting been in powder form as in that state it's easier to remove virtually all the base metals and silver, if a little powder is poured over when rinsing or pouring off the nitric simply put it through a filter later and run it with another batch, this is especially true if you are processing your own material or an assayed bar, you haven't lost the gold its there to be processed later.
