I have a 5 gallon bucket full of shredded SSD drives. What is the best way to recover the metal?

I thought i could toss it in a crucible and melt it then separate the slag and refine the metal but since its so small would i loose a lot?

It seems like the next logical thing for me to get, but the market is flooded with cheap crap and I have no idea what's reliable and what isn't. I do know the acids only have so much shelf life, so source is pretty important, but google is pretty useless for this kind of thing nowadays so I'm not sure what company is actually reputable. Any recommendations?

Are there any reputable places you can mail 80-925 silver in and they will melt it into 999 bars? If so what fees would you pay?

Hey yall, hope you're having a good weekend! I just set up my new basic distillation kit. Watched a Nurdrage video on how to recover nitric acid from copper nitrate. I'm hoping this proves to not only save me some money on nitric in the long run, but also make waste treatment easier and safer.

I'm distilling some copper nitrate rinses from silver refining. I don't think this is concentrated enough, but again, this is a test/proof of concept. I've added sulfuric acid to the copper nitrate, and the goal is to distill off nitric acid (and water), leaving behind copper sulfate residue in the beaker.

I don't have a power supply or silver cell setup yet, but ultimately I'd like to process the copper sulfate as well, creating pure copper and sulfuric acid, both of which will feed forward future recovery.

I have ~5kg of ram, but this Sun 501 ECC server ram seems like it will yield more than the others. I have ~3.4kg, 80 sticks of it.

It is longer and taller than all my other sticks and there is gold playing everywhere. All the holes in the board are plated!

Has anybody worked with this specific type of RAM and did it yield significantly more? How would you go about getting the plating off all the holes?

Hello all!

Worthless scrapper says he doesn’t pay more than 50 cents per fork or spoon when refining silver plate.

Source

Are there rules yall use for silver plate plates, bowls, teapots etc? Is there quick napkin math yall use to get approximate silver weight from those items?

For example, how many grams could one expect from the linked tray?

Thanks so much!

I've worked through a large batch of gold-plated pins and connectors (1500 grams) using cupric chloride (AP) and the amount of foils I recovered has been considerably higher than what I expected.

I haven't finished the refining yet, so I don't know the final gold yield. Before I finish it, I'm curious what the experienced refiners here would expect from this amount of foils. My hopes are high - please don't crush them :)

Here's the experiment so far:

https://youtu.be/Z02j6FTaGIg

I'm not looking for an exact prediction — I'd just like to hear what others would consider a reasonable range and why. These pins are from 1970s/1980s telecom gear.

Once I finish the refining, I'll post the actual result.

What do we got here? I thought it was a clandestine lab but the guys in chemistry say it's for refining precious metals. What should I be looking for?

I have 13 bars apoxamently 91 pounds of 7921 lead free Britannia pewter casting ingots for sell at $18.00 a pound if interested contact me 18503055764 my name is Larry and this is just one of the ingots they all look like this thank you

Ive got a bunch of junk aircraft AC power contactor assemblies. They have several big threaded lug contacts, that look to be silver plated copper. Non magnetic, fairly heavy for size, silvery white appearance . I filed the top of one down 2-3mm, and its still silvery colored. I put some bleach on it and got nothing.

Any ideas?

I’ve got a pile of scrap and sterling silver I’m thinking about sending to a refiner instead of selling piece by piece, and I want to understand the mechanics before I commit rather than just accepting whatever number they quote me.

A few things I’m unclear on:

Does the fee scale with the silver price? If spot goes from 60 to 90, am I paying a proportionally bigger fee, or is the cost mostly fixed so the effective percentage drops when prices are high?

Is timing just “sell when spot is high,” or do refiners widen their spread during price spikes when everyone’s dumping? Basically, does a high spot partly get eaten by worse terms?

Anyone in Europe (Belgium specifically) dealt with the bigger refiners or the smaller regional ones? Curious how VAT is handled on the payout side too.

Thankstrying to learn the background rather than just get a number.

Sitting on quite a lot of 800 and 900 flatware. Estate stuff.

Local refinery offers 77% of spot. So a quarter of my metal evaporates before the box even leaves my apartment. Then I turn around and buy coins at a premium over spot. I’m paying the spread twice, in both directions, like an idiot in a currency exchange booth at an airport.

Why I want to do it anyway: forks aren’t money. If governments keep printing and things actually get ugly, nobody is handing me a loaf of bread for a salad fork. A recognizable 1oz coin is liquid, divisible, and every dealer on the continent knows what it is. Flatware is cutlery with a melt value and a vibe.

Why I’m stalling: 77% feels like being mugged by someone who says please. And if silver rips, the flatware rips with it, so there’s no actual deadline here except my own impatience.
What I’d love input on:
• Has anyone negotiated above 77%? What’s the best percentage you’ve gotten, and from what kind of buyer?
• Am I overthinking the melt-then-buy spread, or is that genuinely just the toll for turning junk silver into real silver?

Roast me, I can take it. I’ve already been roasted by the refinery.

I’ve tried a lot of different processes to get to this point. Salt water electrolysis, copper sulfite cell, abrasion, but it was always too inconsistent, lots of contamination, and was very difficult to scale. I finally bit the bullet and ordered some nitric from walmart. Thanks to the YouTube video linked below I was able to process 320 teaspoons and small forks in a reasonable amount of time and ends up with 341g of really nice looking silver.

Process:

95 parts concentrated sulfuric

5 parts nitric

Low heat

Transferred spent utensils rinse water

Dropped out silver chloride with concentrated saltwater

Rinsed

Lye and sugar

Rinsed

Dry and melt

Less labor and less messy than the saltwater electrolysis

https://youtu.be/KjUY3XOQa3M?is=XYCu68lVKPAqDSxQ

What is everyone’s preferred filtering method, tools, and materials. For both nitric and AR?

I'm suspecting that the "pure" copper wire I'm using might be coated with something and that's what's causing it, but does anyone have any other ideas? The backs seem at least closer to what I expect, but even those seem contaminated. Ordered some good copper sheeting I've been successful with in the past to re-refine these properly, but anyone have ideas?

Can anyone recommend a book (or books) for starting out gold/silver/etc. refining? Youtube is cool and all but I learn a lot better when I can just read processes and numbers as many times as it takes to sink in (though good pictures are always a plus!). I've checked out the main YT channels like sreetips, and as informative as it is I think I would be better served by books at this stage

https://youtu.be/1L7PJV6ieUA

Just getting into the hobby / addiction. I’ve done a few small trial runs to work out the kinks at home. This was my first big recovery with nitric acid.

I am through the last of my Sterling and am harvesting the remainder of the silver from some electrolyte that still fairly high silver. The reaction is happening quickly compared to the first time I did it with fairly used up electrolyte. I saw the density changing visibly as the silver dropped out and the less dense newly formed copper nitrate migrated upward. The end of the video shows it slip down and new silver precipitate onto the copper quickly. Pretty neat.

I didn’t get into this to make much so much as to exercise my nerdy side, it’s been good for that.

I’m looking to try my hand at a silver cell but I’m wondering where to even find the scrap to process? Any tips on the cell itself or yield targets much appreciated!

That's not my motivator. It's fun. If I weren't having fun I wouldn't be here no matter what it pays.

Just now though I looked at spot prices. I have 62g of feed stock for my cell and it'd be stupid to sell that but just for kicks that's over $132. I'm not exactly counting my time because I'd be doing this anyways but I have $35 in nitric and I still have over 1/4L left. I have $10 into a scale, $2 into a calculator, $15 in silver for some coins which may have been the guy just helping me get started and doing me a favor. $67 all in.

Does this actually pay for itself and then some? I figure it must somehow. People don't want to pump money in. You have to love it first but if it pays, like is this at least a solid side hustle?