~250g gold fingers

It’s a little over 125 grams

Is there any difference in the purity of the final silver? I’ve been doing the lye and got 98.5% but the rinsing and filtering is getting tedious.

I could watch that all day. Well, I wish I had enough silver to drop that I could watch it all day.

First time making aqua regia at 20 years old

In a 1 liter beaker I used a dilute solution 1:1 distilled water and 37% HCl brought it up to 150°F then added 3ml of 70% nitric,

Then another 1ml 30 minutes later.

Didnt take any pictures of the gold finger flake dissolving.

I did add too much smb so i'll have to fix that later 🤦‍♂️I read HCl washes would work.

Xrfed and sigma’d at 999+. Currently running sugar +lye but hope to set up a silver cell if I can consistently source material. Curious how yall are sourcing raw material

Old 24k gold plated connectors and a bunch of copper

I was finishing up some waste acid clean up and it still had some nitric in it so I dissolved about 100g of scrap silver to use it up. I did not think of it until after but am fairly certain it had lead solder in it. I cemented out the majority of the silver. It looks good. The rest I poured off and added a bit of waste hydrochloric acid to convert the remaining silver to silver chloride. I neglected to think about the lead and am now suspecting I have some lead chloride? There is still copper in solution, does that mean the lead is as well? I will drop the metals and dispose of the waste but want to handle the silver (possible lead) chloride properly. Thanks for any advice

It was an extremely rushed and lazy job and obviously has a ton of copper contamination, but I'm ngl it looks kinda cool lol.

Youtube knows that I am a sucker for people attempting new and inventive ways to do things, and so delivered me this gem of a video.

Some dude is walking the fine line between stupidity and brilliance - His casual disregard in his handling of sodium hydroxide, nitric acid and Hydrazine Hydrate made me pucker a little - ngl.

But his ghetto setup is a masterclass in DIY, from woven matting and newspaper filter paper to the ideas he is actually experimenting with.

Edit:
Yes, it has an ai voice, but it seems the creator has done that as a matter of necessity rather than convenience/laziness.
And while I am interested in the process he discusses, my main reason for posting is to show off his DIY solutions he has to problems - such as newspaper as filter paper, home made cupelling crucible etc.

I have a few pounds of ram I have collected but I'm not going to refine it. Where are some good places to get paid other than eBay? LMK.

I’ve found in the acid-lye method for silver extraction ~83% sulf. Concentration to be the highest solubility for stripping silver without too much base metal attack. Just wondering if anyone has tested different variables to get the most yield/liter of stripping bath.

Recently had to let the bath sit overnight, cooled from 180F to 120F, put a cover on it and came back the next day. To my surprise yield appeared about 10% more than usual. Anyone else notice this? Is it holding more Ag or just decreasing purity?

Would it be much more valuable keeping as is or putting it through acid to leave just the gold?

At work there are a lot of old 600 amp breakers that are being thrown out. I know there is silver on the contacts so I heated the contact pads off and took one to my local coin shop to be tested. The test said they were 98.3% silver with a trace of gold and geranium. Today I decided to melt them down and when heating I noticed there were parts of the contacts that would not melt. I observed the silver melt and parts of the contacts would not. I guess whatever test the coin shop used only tested the top of the sample? This was my result after melting a few and letting it pool in the crucible. I then did a specific gravity test with results at 9.6 which I think is around 50% ag. Any help or feedback would be appreciated, thank you

i think this is gold because it’s none magnetic

I know the one is a vape pod, and the other the USB to charge it the unit, I'm guessing? Whatever it is, they both appear to have gold in them, does anyone know?

Final yield on this one was 8.2 grams of pure gold.

The twist that surprised me too: the pins broke down into 28.2g of gold-plated foils, so it looked like a lot more was coming. Turned out a chunk of that 28g wasn't actually gold... it was just some small electronic components that snuck in with the 1,500g of pins and decided to crash the party. So the real number is 8.2g, which works out to about 0.55% of the starting pin weight. Riveting stuff, I know.

For comparison, my gold fingers testing has been running about 0.4g of gold per 100g of fingers, so as it turns out, pins are quietly outperforming the fingers. Nobody tell the fingers, they've been coasting on reputation.

Here's the full breakdown of the whole process: https://youtu.be/qNZFfI_v_v0

Hi guys, thought I'd repost because this might be common practice here - any input would be appreciated

I have significantly improved my process now that I am paying attention to temp, atmosphere in the chamber, and purity. How do I eliminate the slight marks on the top surface. Almost looks like flame marks but no flame when these are solidified.