Neonbros
New member
I started my precious metal adventures before finding this forum and its incredible resources. I want to check my understanding so far and would love feedback.
I've been de-plating silver items in a liter of water with as much non-iodized salt as could be dissolved. I know using electrolysis can get me colloidal/ionic silver. Hopefully, instead this would mean the sodium chloride caught any ionic silver which gives me silver chloride in solution, which it did and was easy to recover with filtration. I was using several different silver plated pieces that had a lot of different base metals breaking down. I hadn't considered this a problem until I had a brownish red foaming solution. I assume it was iron chloride so I added vinegar drop by drop until the solution cleared up and then filtered it. I understand now that adding vinegar created trace amounts of HCL but how does this affect the silver recovery? I also know people have mentioned that de-plating through electrolysis takes 10s of minutes to hours and that mechanical separation is impractical however using a nonreactive hard bristle toothbrush at the same time let me fully de-plate each item in about 5 minutes, with the longest taking closer to 10 minutes - has anyone tried this or does anyone have thoughts on this method?
I'm saving the silver for when I feel more comfortable trying to refine it, though for now I did melt them into 2 nice and shiny buttons.
I'm hoping to try to use Acidic Peroxide (AP) to start cleaning up e-waste and if understand it correctly my steps should be as follows:
1 - Separating scrap into pieces with only/primary copper contamination
2 - Set up AP with some green(oxidized) copper HCL and peroxide at a 2-1 ratio till I have that good old CuCl2
3 - Put in the scrap, a bubbler, and dissolve!
What confuses me is the "reuse-ability" of acidic peroxide. I've heard it's reusable but I'm not sure if my understanding is correct.
I believe once I'm confident all the copper is dissolved or the solution is saturated I should:
1 - Filter out my remaining solids
2 - Let the solution relax. Without the bubbler any excess copper should precipitate out.
3 - Filter out the precipitate copper, and spruce up with more HCL as needed.
Am I understanding this correctly so far?
Lastly, for the E-waste, I cant confidently separate my plan so far is to
1) Run in a ball-mill and pull out larger plastic pieces I couldn't separate beforehand
2) Incinerate
3) Water filter any soluble ash out
Here's where things get weird. My stock pot has mostly copper in solution. If I store my mixed metals e-waste powder everything higher than copper in the reactivity series should get dissolved leaving me with Precious Metals and copper ready for AP treatment. I would then filter the solution to a secondary stock pot for treatment.
It seems like a much easier way of handling metals I'm unsure about but it almost seems to easy I feel like I'm missing something.
I've read a lot of mixed responses to incineration/milling so even if I did not, would "storing" my semi-dubious scraps in a stock pot to swap the metals be worth it? What issue might I face?
To be perfectly honest chemistry was never my strong suit and I am finding it difficult to retain certain information I'm double/ triple google checking reactions and having this forum to look back on is incredible. I am reading/re-reading Hoke's book but just wanted to make sure I'm on the right path.
I've been de-plating silver items in a liter of water with as much non-iodized salt as could be dissolved. I know using electrolysis can get me colloidal/ionic silver. Hopefully, instead this would mean the sodium chloride caught any ionic silver which gives me silver chloride in solution, which it did and was easy to recover with filtration. I was using several different silver plated pieces that had a lot of different base metals breaking down. I hadn't considered this a problem until I had a brownish red foaming solution. I assume it was iron chloride so I added vinegar drop by drop until the solution cleared up and then filtered it. I understand now that adding vinegar created trace amounts of HCL but how does this affect the silver recovery? I also know people have mentioned that de-plating through electrolysis takes 10s of minutes to hours and that mechanical separation is impractical however using a nonreactive hard bristle toothbrush at the same time let me fully de-plate each item in about 5 minutes, with the longest taking closer to 10 minutes - has anyone tried this or does anyone have thoughts on this method?
I'm saving the silver for when I feel more comfortable trying to refine it, though for now I did melt them into 2 nice and shiny buttons.
I'm hoping to try to use Acidic Peroxide (AP) to start cleaning up e-waste and if understand it correctly my steps should be as follows:
1 - Separating scrap into pieces with only/primary copper contamination
2 - Set up AP with some green(oxidized) copper HCL and peroxide at a 2-1 ratio till I have that good old CuCl2
3 - Put in the scrap, a bubbler, and dissolve!
What confuses me is the "reuse-ability" of acidic peroxide. I've heard it's reusable but I'm not sure if my understanding is correct.
I believe once I'm confident all the copper is dissolved or the solution is saturated I should:
1 - Filter out my remaining solids
2 - Let the solution relax. Without the bubbler any excess copper should precipitate out.
3 - Filter out the precipitate copper, and spruce up with more HCL as needed.
Am I understanding this correctly so far?
Lastly, for the E-waste, I cant confidently separate my plan so far is to
1) Run in a ball-mill and pull out larger plastic pieces I couldn't separate beforehand
2) Incinerate
3) Water filter any soluble ash out
Here's where things get weird. My stock pot has mostly copper in solution. If I store my mixed metals e-waste powder everything higher than copper in the reactivity series should get dissolved leaving me with Precious Metals and copper ready for AP treatment. I would then filter the solution to a secondary stock pot for treatment.
It seems like a much easier way of handling metals I'm unsure about but it almost seems to easy I feel like I'm missing something.
I've read a lot of mixed responses to incineration/milling so even if I did not, would "storing" my semi-dubious scraps in a stock pot to swap the metals be worth it? What issue might I face?
To be perfectly honest chemistry was never my strong suit and I am finding it difficult to retain certain information I'm double/ triple google checking reactions and having this forum to look back on is incredible. I am reading/re-reading Hoke's book but just wanted to make sure I'm on the right path.
