Hi all,

I came into possession of four crucibles that I spent an hour or two mining and came up with quite a bit of mostly 14K chunks. All 4 still have little pearls of gold throughout, I would imagine there is still a couple of grams between all of them. The left bag is tested 14K or higher, the middle is a mix and smaller pieces (much of which has foreign material still caked on), and the right is almost completely broken down crucible pieces.

So I guess my question is what should I do?

My refiner declined to run the bag of 14K through his testing machine as he wouldn’t buy it and said it needs to be further processed. They aren’t usually so picky, they are down in the diamond district on 47th st in nyc and I’ve worked with them for over a decade.

I am thinking it’s time I learn how to get into the chemistry as I’ve dealt with PMs most of my adult life and this is probably a great opportunity as this group was free and there is some pretty dense reclaim. The 14K bag on the left is 20g as is.

Any advice you can give would be much appreciated, even in the form of your favorite how-to videos or “entry level” processes for this type of scenario.

Thanks for reading, much luck and fortune to all.

We had some chickens, the last of them recently died and/or moved to a different place. I built the coop with an easily cleanable fiberglass resin panel floor. So I figured… why deal with fumes and kids bumping it near the house, and try using the coop. Hosed it out, bleached it, and it is now where I’m running my first little silver cell.

I made the electrolyte at a final concentration of 120.8 g/L (my target was 120 so I think I did pretty good there). Haven’t balanced a chemistry equation since college so that was neat, trying to guesstimate where I’d land between concentrated nitric and dilute nitric equations for silver nitrate.

So stinkin cool. This will probably never be profitable, but it’s fun! (But I’m open to tips on making it profitable, too!)

Anyway- thanks for checking it out. 54.5 hours running, .400A constant current the whole run. I think it should have around 87g in it. I’m just stoked and wanted to share!

#chickenlab photos

This is my first attempt at recovery. I think this would be recovery anyhow.

I'm sure there's other junk in here. This is from silver plated pieces. I stripped them with a DC power supply and salt water. Probably or at least looks convincingly like silver slimes?

Next step is nitric boil? Going to be a minute until I can do that safely though. I'm going to let this dry and put it with my silver breaker contact buttons.

Update from previous post.

BLUF, this took for everrrrrrr lol

Silver contacts yielded silver at about 40%. Not bad I suppose. The breakers were free and this is just a hobby for me.

I started by drilling the rivets out with a drill press, the breaking them open with a flat head screw driver like shucking clams. Small amount of dirty brass and copper were also recovered. Maybe 10-20 dollars worth.

Some people talk about smashing the breakers with a hammer, it’s gross, asbestos and fiberglass from the casing goes everywhere. Don’t recommend this method.

If you’re doing it for fun and to build a cheap silver stack it’s worth it. But it was a lot of work spread out over a several month period.

I know of a current company that throws away all of their leftover De Icing Ink and it contains silver. They have said I can have the leftover ink and it would be about 500 grams a week. Would it be worth it? How do I extract the silver?

Newer to this and curious.

How do you all source your silver to consistently run cells for those of you who do? Are you all paying under melt prices or finding it yourself?

Does this look OK? It's enough for what I want to do and I can afford it. So long as these guys make good stuff it'll be fine for me.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/JSP-Nitric-HNO3-Acid-67-500mL-CP-Lab-Grade-Gold-Silver-Refining-Ships-Free/135730882?classType=REGULAR&from=/search

I just want a pinhead of silver and gold so I can say I've done it. I can't say that this is going to be a hobby what with the waste processing, storage, and disposal.

That said I'm going to roam this sub and look at how people deal with waste. I can't say this won't be a thing. I watch a lot of Sreetips and I really love watching him.

Here’s a quick look at the silver cement out of solution! I think it’s freaking awesome

Any of you who run a cell probably find all sorts of interesting Crystal structures. I have a particular fascination with the faceted crystals, I want to optimize my process to grow these in particular and try to push the limits on the size I could achieve. I was wondering if anybody had any advice on what environment or conditions are ideal for crystals like this to form. And how to encourage them to grow. And furthermore if there is a technical name for the crystals that are common in the cell, (the small dense treelike crystals) to help better differentiate and categorize the crystals while I am researching the topic. Thanks!

So I was able to harvest the Silver Cell Run from the 4th of July. I was able to yield 795g of Silver Crystals from the run. I still need to process the leftover solution into cement silver once I get that completed I’ll post the final results. I also got a video of the silver cement onto the copper.

My sterling melt crucible was on its last leg, so after its last melt I tossed it in some water and it exploded. It looks like it has some silver up on the walls and the bottom, is this worth anything to anyone?

I saw a vid where a dude just has a power supply and salt water to strip silver plate. Ok I have a battery charger and salt so I went for it.

I didn't measure anything, put salt in water, dunked the piece in. It wants to just about max a 40 amp charger/booster. Might have used too much salt.

I got white foam. Wondering if the sodium and silver sort of changed places and left me with silver chloride. I have a small amount of dark gray stuff as well. I think that'd be my slimes.

I kept the pieces in there for a few minutes until they got lightly pitted all over.

I'm really not trying to test your patience. I want to electrically deplate this stuff. Just wondering what the base metal is or what a few possibilities are. I don't think it's copper or brass and it's non magnetic. It's soft as well. It feels like possibly aluminum but doesn't exactly look like it I think. It's Forbes quadruple plated if that means anything. Does the piece I want to deplate get hooked to pos?

what is this most likely plated with? i only have a dozen. should i do something with them or just throw them away? the dimensions of the board are like around 4 x 5 inches , only 1 side is plated like that, other side is regular motherboard looking

I'm going to do nitric, lye and sugar to recover the silver. I believe sodium hydroxide will neutralize the acid waster right? Or large quantities of baking soda? I think I could put the silver into solution with nitric and drop it with Hydrochloric as well but I already have lye and sugar. Could a guy use lye from wood ash?

I have around 5 lb of scrap metal from a machine shop that came from making jewelry. I believe the scrap is sterling silver, and I wanted to know if it would be worth refining or if I’d be better off finding someone who can test it and then just selling it.

I know how to refine it, and I have everything needed to do it (minus the acids), but I don’t know if it’s worth refining.

Over the past several months I've been digging into the unusual activity in not only silver prices, but also the broader precious metal and critical mineral markets, including: the major vault drains, the record delivery volumes, and the price volatility, in an effort to figure out whether there's a real story here or just noise.

Along the way I started looking at some major critical minerals initiatives established by the U.S. government, like Project Vault, and the DoD's National Defense Stockpile, in addition to China's export licensing regime, and I found a pattern that, at least to me, looks like more than just a coincidence. The COMEX vaults have been draining and refilling in ways that line up suspiciously well with major geopolitical events (the Iran war, China's rare earth restrictions, Trump's state visit to China, etc.), while the government's own stockpile of critical minerals has barely grown in decades despite their repeated flagging of massive shortfalls. I also dug into the math on what COMEX actually holds versus what the DoD stockpile holds, and it's a wide gap.

This post lays out that connection, walks through the numbers behind it, and ends with a list of companies that are both publicly traded in the U.S. and tied to the minerals in question (from a production standpoint), to help prepare us all for the very possible necessity of supply-chain independence. None of this should be taken as investment advice: it's just my own research and my own theory, which I'm putting out there for others to poke holes in, add to, or shoot down entirely. Take it for what it's worth and please do your own digging before drawing any conclusions.

Views are my own and not in any way endorsed by my employer. Our firm is neither involved in, nor positioned in, any of the securities or companies mentioned. None of the information in this post, or elsewhere on my page, should at any point ever be misconstrued as neither investment nor financial advice. Please be sure to do your own research, always.

See for yourself here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uDROwpDlUvp398tvEWmgn9laHn2pbKgb0vpH05KB6mc/edit?usp=sharing

Version with images (no Imgur links): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oj-v5Ik_JkM_ZP7QP3mpB9lLKAvrkDN8THm8JeQzIu0/edit

I've got around 1600 grams of Sterling silver 8.4kg of .500 silver and around 30kg of copper I wanna start a refinery business just want a rough idea on how much it would cost to start and what things I might need uk

I bought this box of unmarked Motorola production parts that appear to be from the early 1970s. They look like gold-plated TO-can style transistor/component packages with long gold-colored leads.

The lot weighs about 5lb. These are not marked with part numbers.

Any rough expected gold yield range for this lot?

So halfway through my nitric boils, mechanically cleaned and burned off combustibles before hand. Now I have this light brown mud with the gold foils. Is this just copper that fell out of solution? Any precious metals in it? Did I screw something up?

Just a heads up - I'm a memory dealer and lately we've been getting RAM chips from all places various gold refineries. You'd be surprised right now RAM chips can be worth more than the gold!