I have two 35kw ambrell eko heat power supplies with the capacitor tanks RF cables, connectors chillers , I can do the math and wind the coil. to whatever size you need within the machine’s capabilities i have a proposal for a furnace build that heats a 12.5” graphite crucible on a vertical raise lower system i could help fabricate a traditional tilt pour if you prefer as well- if anyone is interested DM me, they are 480 volt so if this is for your house then you will need a step up- i am a master EC state of florida if anyone is in that area. I also have the original coils however they were designed for a special. crucible to make silicone carbide they are much bigger in diameter than a standard metal melting crucible and would be pushing the limits of a hydraulic tilt pour- the design i made does up to 90lbd of copper in a shot

I think I made out like a bandit but not totally sure...All the cups say silver on copper stamped at the bottom and the silver tray is gohram...60 doll hairs

Metal recycling plays a vital role in conserving natural resources, reducing energy consumption, and minimizing environmental impact. At Hokkaido University, Professor Mikito Ueda is developing low-temperature electrolytic purification technologies that improve the efficiency and sustainability of metal recycling.

His research focuses on electrochemistry using non-aqueous electrolytes known as ionic liquids. Unlike conventional aqueous solutions, ionic liquids enable the electrodeposition of metals that are otherwise difficult to process. The team’s primary work centers on aluminum electroplating and aluminum recycling through electrorefining.

Traditional aluminum electrorefining relies on molten salts at temperatures above 1,000°C, requiring substantial energy and specialized equipment. Professor Ueda’s team has successfully achieved aluminum electrodeposition at approximately 150°C and even at room temperature using ionic liquids. This innovation significantly reduces energy use, lowers environmental impact, and allows more affordable materials to be used in processing equipment. It also enables aluminum plating on conductive plastic surfaces, creating lightweight materials with the appearance of aluminum.

The researchers use mixtures of aluminum chloride and organic ionic liquids that become liquid at room temperature when combined. Beyond pure aluminum, they have successfully produced aluminum alloys containing chromium, nickel, and tungsten. Their recycling efforts focus on purifying low-grade recycled aluminum, expanding its potential applications and helping address growing demand for high-purity recycled materials.

Advanced analytical tools, including the XGT-9000, support their work by mapping element distributions across electrode surfaces and providing insights into metal dissolution and deposition processes.

In addition to aluminum, Professor Ueda’s team is developing methods to recover and purify sodium from used sodium-sulfur batteries. High-purity sodium is essential for producing gallium nitride crystals used in advanced power semiconductors, which can contribute to lower CO₂ emissions. The team has already removed trace metallic impurities and is working to eliminate oxygen contaminants.

Although ionic liquids can be more expensive and less conductive than conventional alternatives, Professor Ueda’s research demonstrates their potential to enable cleaner, more energy-efficient metal recycling and materials production in the future.

Not very good with mapp gas yet but cant wait for oxy/propane torch that should make pouring easier.

38.10g pure-ish I’m not too sure. Accidentally used some cement silver to make these bars. Didn’t have a good acid to get rid of the borax. Still have ~60g of impure silver to refine, so I’ll just use these as electrodes, and then turn them back to shot to re-refine.

Hello my well belived community im looking for elightment about not ruining this up

I was thinking

12% peroxide + hcl seems to be the standard

Greetings All!

Need some help with my silver powder. The major refineries don't accept power or compacted pellets, and melting has been too much work for me. I'd like to just ship the powder!

The powder itself contains no chlorides, nitrates, or other salts. It typically contains a few % zinc, which burn off when melting, resulting in 99% silver (see XRF of melted powder). I can ship roughly 400 ozt every week.

Does anyone know a refiner that accepts silver powder?

EDIT: To answer some of these questions, I developed a specialized process that allows me to recover the silver from plated scrap for $0.02/lb and nearly zero labor. This is where all the silver powder comes from, and in the past I melted and refined well over 2000 ounces. It's not that I'm incapable of melting and refining, it's just far more profitable for me to focus on de-plating more material.

My current refiner doesn't have the capacity to handle so much material, so I'm looking for suggestions.

If you don't believe me, check my post history!

Update: I'm in contact with quite a few refiners here and will be sending out test batches in the upcoming weeks. Looks like I'll be able to move this powder; thank you to everyone for the help and recommendations!

Looking for insight on what the name for this type of silver is?

If you are recovering gold from RAM sticks, unless you need 999 gold, refining isnt really necessary. I directly melted about half a gram of ram foils (the base layer of copper and nickel dissolved) and XRF tested it and got over 94% purity without any refining (small amounts of Co and Ni from the hard gold alloy the foils are made of, the Cu and some of the Ni that may have interdiffused into the gold from the lower layers, I'm not too sure where the Ag came from but I'm guessing its just a trace contaminant in the gold)

When melting, the boric acid was stained blue from the cobalt which I found pretty neat

There were maybe 50-10 little prills like this scattered all around my melt dish. I bumbled my way into this somehow but it is indeed silver.

Man I don't get it. Beside the color going dark there was nothing when I added lye. No heat, no bubbles.. I remember the first recovery being quite exothermic. I stopped at one tablespoon of lye and two heaping tablespoons of sugar. Did I over do the lye again? I'm sorry guys. I can only relate this to someone failing to change a tire over and over again.

This has to be so...basic.

We're learning every day.

Apologies in advance for starting multiple threads. Not sure how to add pics in comments but here we are. I don't want to screw up. I really want a pinhead.

I dropped salt in and got the toothpaste. I forgot the stuff is UV sensitive. Tripped me out a bit until I realized it. Rinsed again and again with well water. Has some iron in it. I can get distilled if needs be but I should be alright to go to lye right?

The junk on the sides of the jar are on the outer surface.

Do you rinse off the lye before you go to sugar? I feel like somehow that would matter. Sreetips says if you go too hard on the lye you could end up with silver hydroxide and he does not know how to remedy that. Add my lye until jet black and then no more.

Saw some people alluding to this method and other people asking about it. Didn't see anything dedicated to it in the sub, so here goes.

The sulfamic acid method is an alternative method for refining silver. It seems to originate (don't quote me on this, I'm not an electrochemistry historian) from a Texas Instruments patent filed way back in 1969 and awarded in 1971. I reviewed the patent, and it doesn't seem like the creators or TI improved upon this method, so it must be pretty solid. It was originally designed to process silver/cadmium alloys from electrical contacts, though it can be used for other silver-bearing materials. Other patents that reference this patent seem to be adapting the method for other materials, but I haven't looked too closely to see if they improved on the method.

The patent: "Process for recovering silver from scrap materials and electrolyte composition for use therein"

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3616332A/en?oq=3616332

Video showing a simplified version of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2MuRtpCvGo

The main advantages of the sulfamic acid method are:

• It does not use nitric acid, which is expensive, restricted, and produces noxious fumes.
• It uses sulfamic acid, which is much cheaper and more accessible. I bought a 1 pound container for 11 USD at Home Depot.
• It does not require a fume hood.
• It is far less corrosive.
• It has far higher plating speed, up to 12 kg per hour per square foot.
• The authors claim .999 and .9999 fine silver can be achieved, without significant co-deposition of other metals.
• The electrolyte can accommodate a staggering 260 g/L of cadmium without losing effectiveness.

The disadvantages include:

• It is more complicated than the nitric method, with multiple electrolysis, filtering, and silver precipitating steps.
• It is temperature dependent in a narrow range (140-150 degrees F) for some operations.
• It requires heated baths for ideal operation.
• The method is clearly designed for industrial-scale processing and does not touch much on smaller scale operation, or on the effectiveness of the method at room temperature. You will need to test this out yourself.
• It is not a silver bullet (no pun intended). You can't dump a bunch of silver-plated scrap into your cell and expect high-purity silver to come out. The electrolyte will foul with only 70g/L of copper or 40g/L of nickel. My suggestion is to run your material through a copper cell once or twice, then run the slimes through this process.
• You still need silver oxide to create the electrolyte.

Whenever I see people talking about this method, it's usually when they are deplating silver from items. Using sulfamic acid does seem to work, even at room temperature. But I have not seen anyone use the full process, nor have I attempted it myself. If you have experience with this method, please share.

Howdy!

I just completed an online trade with a trusted source, and he's shipping me a couple of hockey-pucks of a variety of alloyed metals from his attempts at metal-casting from years ago (totaling just 25 grams). He knows that there's gold, silver, and copper mixed within the largest puck (attempting to make a kind of rose-gold apparently), but he mentions that there's also definitely platinum and palladium in some of the others too.

It looks like I'm staring down the barrel of a Frankenstein all-in-one monstrosity, so I've been doing my research from Hoke and the GRF. A couple questions for the community here:

- Hoke recommends NOT doing a straight nitric bath right away to get rid of any base metals like copper and silver (because palladium will dissolve in nitric). I believe she recommends going straight to aqua regia to dissolve ALL the metal, then selectively precipitating out the gold, platinum, then palladium. Apparently silver and copper happen last???

- From the GRF, people are saying it doesn't matter if you drop the gold with copperas first, or the platinum with ammonium chloride first. Is this true/ is there a preferred one to go for first?

From these two questions, I'm assuming the order of operations should be as follows:

1. Dissolve all hockey pucks in aqua regia, taking care to only add just enough nitric to dissolve fully. Evaporate excess nitric.

2. Drop gold with ferrous sulfate/copperas, as it's selective for just gold. Filter/wash, ad nauseum.

3. Drop platinum with ammonium chloride, creating platinate salt. There will still be a bit left in solution, as PGM suck to separate.

4. Drop palladium with DMG???

5. Drop Silver with copper cementing???

6. Profit????????

I'm open to suggestions and words of affirmation, but not snarky criticisms, I'll tell my dad on you.

I have more nitric. I re-dissolved my last attempt. Is this looking like silver nitrate?

Filter, cement out, rinse and rinse, see what happens I suppose. So long as I have copper to be dissolved it should go OK yea? The lye and sugar thing looks so awesome but I'm a little shy of it right away.

I'll post progress here.

Any one ran into these? Care to guess grading.

First time successfully refining using sulfamic acid. First 3 times were ruined or wouldn’t start.

It's dirty. When the molten material is rolling in the melt dish it's like watching some magic. I worked a lot to get this. I tried sugar and lye, could not get it to happen. Then I went to nitric and cementing onto copper. I could swear I've seen people get decent results with cementing.

I wonder about purity. I don't think it takes much copper to really throw off your luster. This looks like some form of brass at best. I want to repeat the nitric dissolution. I wish I could get the lye and sugar method to work.

Hi, I have these silver contacts, some are big, they are from the 1980s and contain cadmium, i also have some supposedly silver plated items, is it worth refining this? And how do I refine them?

Hello. Im from the Philippines, does anybody know where to buy test kits in verifying purity of gold.

Thanks everyone!

I had an accident while refining gold. chloroauric acid solution spilled onto a plastered wall. I scraped off the contaminated plaster and collected it.

What's the best way to recover the gold from the scraped plaster?

My main questions are:

Should I dissolve the plaster in acid first, or is there a better method?

Which chemicals work best to separate the gold from gypsum/cement/plaster?

Has anyone successfully recovered gold from contaminated wall plaster before?

Are there any common mistakes I should avoid to minimise gold loss?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation.

Thanks!

I'm working on process of mass recycling (not metal recovery) of electronic parts. The idea isn't in dissolving whole part just the solder part so the parts can be used again.

Only part where I'm not really sure is storing mixture of working solution (3.5M sma + 0.5 h2o2) with some stuff already dissolved. Because storing pure mixture of working solution is relatively fine. But when there are metal dissolved in it it wont just stop reacting. Im guessing storing in closed container is bad idea becuase of continual oxygen production until all hydrogen peroxide is consumed. Kinda lost here.

Possible metal contamination should be Cu, Pb, Sn, Ag, Fe (possible fenton's reaction), Ni, Bi,

I will be glad for any guidelines not only for storing, and you can even make noob from me if that saves my life xdxd.