Non-Chemical Silver plated scrap for silver recovery

[Harold_V]

It's important for you to understand that you do NOT use HCl (muriatic) when attempting to process silver.
Copper wire that is insulated can be stripped, even by hand. A simple device (hole in a piece of wood) that will hold a box knife in the center will suffice. You can slit the insulation and pull it off. Not a big deal, even if you must slit the insulation without a guide. The real problem is there's not all that much silver on the wire, and wire isn't a good idea for cementing. As it degrades, it often breaks in to small pieces, contaminating the silver. Not fatal, but best avoided. In this case, you'd be far better served to melt the wire and pour bars, using them to recover any future silver that you process.

Home made nitric doesn't work all that well for processing silver, from all accounts. You'd be well served to listen to butcher in that regard. He has experience, including in distilling nitric.
I have none. I did all of my refining with commercially prepared chemicals. I am not well versed on the vast majority of the processes we discuss on the forum, due in part to my having been away from refining since retiring back in '94. There was no need for them while I was actively refining.

Harold

 

[nickvc]

Nancy as I have said before homemade nitric isn't the best to use for this but if you must you need to distill it.
You also in reality need to remove the plastic coating to allow the acid access to the surfaces to dissolve it or the process will be fairly slow, very slow.
The problem your going to have with the wire is that it's going to needed to be watched carefully, the nitric will attack and dissolve the silver until copper is exposed and then it will attack the copper and cement some of your silver back out of solution, if you can get a decent amount of the silver to dissolve and then remove it, adding more plated wire into the solution, you could use the wire that's left over to cement your final solution and get back the silver still on it.
You also shouldn't need to use urea if you use the nitric until it won't strip further just add a drop more nitric to the solution to kick start the cementation process, dilution of proper nitric is recommended as it stops crystals forming and makes the acid go further.