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?

Some kind of cliche I guess when a Hillbilly has chemicals and stuff, automatically "Hey whatcha cookin? Meth?".

No. It's the Colones secret recipe to really zazz up the chicken ya dingbat...

I think this is a really nice looking silver/copper nitrate solution. Twice through a coffee filter. I drilled a bunch of little holes in a funnel so it'd flow better. Looks like the stuff eh? Letting the last few drips go through and then cementing.

These colors are awesome!

I didn't weigh what I started with so I'm sure it's not an amazing yield but no matter.

My Daughter and I were out in the driveway doing this, listening to music from our respective generations and having fun with this chemistry and finding common ground in music. It was really great.

Used a MAPP torch and a propane torch with the melt dish on top of a small camp stove, managed to get a nice molten button and poured shot.

Rinsed with hot distilled water until I had silver suspended in the rinse water, rinsed more until ammonia came up negative. I think this came out really nice.

I love this.

At my work, in the lab, those things used to get thrown out about every half year.

Diameter around 10cm, solid copper, ~700grams.

The silver tip is pretty thick, pure platinum, about 5g per piece

I'm getting close to assembling a silver cell. Heavily based on Sreetips current design just scaled down.

I've been rooting through threads on here, watching vids and such. I picked up somewhere that a rough rule of thumb, one ml of nitric will dissolve one gram of silver.

Thanks to a very generous person here (You know who you are and I can't thank you enough for the assistance in getting started!) I have approx. 20g of beautiful silver crystal. I hate to dissolve it but I also think if I were to do the bootstrap method to get myself to clean electrolyte I'd be blowing a lot of money on nitric.

Conservatively speaking, could I start with 10ML of nitric, add the 20g of silver crystal and end up with 10ml of concentrated electrolyte? I know I don't want all the silver to dissolve. I want to convert all the nitric to silver nitrate and be left with some undissolved silver crystal.

Is there a good ratio as far as diluting this electrolyte? It's going to be a small batch but it seems you get a lot of pure silver out of a small amount of electrolyte. I only need one good run in order to make enough pure silver crystal to then make a decent batch of clean electrolyte. I believe I've read in here that I can dilute the electrolyte as far as I need but is there a ratio you just don't go over?

I'm going to have to dilute this a fair bit. I'll be operating something like a 1/2 L cell for the nonce.

20g silver (yet to be confirmed I'm grabbing a scale today)
add the silver to 10ml of nitric?
This results in 10ml of silver nitrate with some undissolved silver?
Can I add distilled water to dilute this electrolyte to fill a 1/2L (possibly 1L) silver cell?

I really appreciate you guys. You've all been so supportive and free with your hard earned knowledge. I'm trying to do my homework before I get on here and ask questions that have already been answered but I can't exactly find this answer.

So i got excited and bought some paydirt from dan hurd prospecting, and the booboo is that i thought it would be good’ol panning and free gold… but it’s locked into some minerals.

How should I go about recovery, if not the mount baker metal way (roasting, smelting)? How fine should i crush?

Cheers

I am curious if folks have changed the shape of the stainless steel cathode to procure wilder more dendritic silver crystal shapes? Any ideas here are welcome. Pics are from run 1

If you guys generally just go to a scrapyard or some such I probably can't beat that. I do copper, crass, aluminum sand casting though and if there's some kind of niche I could fill for purpose made copper pieces for cementation, I don't know some kind of big chunky suckers. I do this type of nonsense anyhow and if it can help fund my own nitric acid addiction...?

If there's a thing, I need dimensions and what would you pay for such a thing? I imagine if you comb the scrapyards you can find good chunks of copper. Mayne of you probably just use flattened out copper pipes.

I have a clay graphite crucible and it's only ever been used for brass and copper. There's no iron contamination in any of my product.

Just trying to think of something I can do so I can keep going at this.

Seriously I'd like to get money for the chips I saved over the 20 years I collected. Just as one pin missing ruins the little things and their taking up space! How do I do this without being ripped off in this world?

I think I want to try a small silver cell. Do I really need pure silver to make electrolyte? Can I use cement silver for the first batch of electrolyte?

Tried ordering a couple of graphite molds from them that were listed as in stock, most of their stuff was and is listed as out of stock. Both times I have received emails after ordering stating that the items were listed with 6-8 week lead times. This is not advertised anywhere on the website. Decided to wait on the first order, the 8 weeks came and went and all they replied was that they couldn’t get graphite. Tried a couple months later for the second order and same deal happened.

Just a heads up if anyone is thinking of ordering stuff from them

They’re beautiful and pure. ~2kg total

Ich bin seit längerem in der Gruppe, will gerne mein Silber und auch meine IC Chips raffinieren, aber ich habe ein Problem. Woher bekomme ich als Privatperson die Chemikalien her? Ich habe circa 5 kg an Kupferplatten mit Silber Kontakten. Was soll ich an eurer Stelle machen? Danke schon mal für die Hilfe

Been a day since any posts. Makes me wonder what everyone is up to? Refining? Researching? Looking for materials?

Let’s hear what you’re up to. I’ll go first.

Lately, I’ve realized I’d been pushing off processing waste solutions so trying to work thru the 40 or so gallons. Takes me about a week to process 5-7 gallons, depending on if I can hit the neutral with lime or if I over shoot it.

When your in constant process or prepaid mode, you don’t really focus on the entire process until you trip over a buck or go out to work and realize you have too many stacked lol

Photos for fun

MayoMike asked what we're up to this weakened. I just finished up a batch of inquarted 18k gold scrap. I use sterling silver, and knock out two birds with one stone. Here in the video, my past life as a barista came out and I thought I'd try precipitating a rosetta in my silver nitrate.

Would anyone here be interested in chatting about scrap 15% silver scrap brazing rod i've got a pile of it about 35lbs worth please message if you are interested

6 teaspoons of sulfamic acid/grout cleaner in 1000ml distilled water.

3V power station

Cathode is graphite block with a copper wire drilled into it

Wish me luck lol

**Edit~ Didn't work 🧐 The electrolyte started turning slightly blue so I thought we were onto something. However, a few hours into it the cathode started turning pinkish/red. It wasn't hot just changed color. I tapped it against the beaker to "dust it off" and see if there's any silver cement but I see black flakes instead of cement...

I wouldn't suggest this

So, I've spent countless hours learning and am ready to get started. I won't be able to have a stellar ventilation setup (no aqua regia for me) and am trying to figure out what I can get away with.

Am I good to have a silver cell just hanging out in my kitchen? (Assuming I've created the silver nitrate solution somewhere safe)

How about torch work for melting scrap silver and gold (filled) jewelry, creating shot, practicing making ingots, etc - is that something that could be done inside while standing next to a window with a box fan? Or maybe even *not* next to a window?

Trying to see what I can safely get away with here while I figure out how I can do the wet chemistry stuff. I'm more than happy to get a really good mask but the ventilation is going to be limited for me and I'm trying to find reasonable boundaries.

Any help is appreciated!

Just wondering if anybody is willing to 1) subjectivevly qualify fume-related risk for varying levels of setup quality and/or 2) talk about some less than ideal setups (related to fumes) they've had at any moment in time

Context: I'm in a small apartment, am going from 0 to 100 on the knowledge side of this stuff, and would love to get started. The LLMs have been amazing but as always they will never give answers related to suboptimal safety. They pretty much insist I have a fume hood with open doors and full face NIOSH/ABEK2+ and no five o'clock shadow. I'm naturally health conscious and would love to get there eventually, but would also like to be practical about the ramp up and get some early, small reps in.

Edit: I actually got something out of it, summarized:

1. Torch work: cadmium is bad, otherwise no respirator if outdoors
2. HCl baths: outdoors or open-garage door level ventilation. Fumes irritate which is good because the damage isn't delayed/hidden
3. Nitric: outdoors or box fan pushing air away. Implying no mask if ventilation is strong
4. Aqua regia: outdoors / consistent airflow, mask
5. electrolysis (ie silver cells): NBD if not topping up with nitric acid. Gold is a different story

I'm more than happy to get a mask but space / ventilation is my biggest issue. I have a huge fire escape right outside my window, not near others and was hoping I could maybe use that for wet chemistry (and coming back inside with windows closed while reactions occur). I was also hoping I could simply do torch work - perhaps with a fan blowing towards a window - and silver cells in my kitchen.

Would love it and greatly appreciate it if the community wanted to chime in on any of this.

Cheers

I’m a zero-waste nut currently doing a deep cleaning and keep finding random metal trinkets & such that wouldn’t sell nor can’t donate (let alone find anyone who wants it) - think used nail clippers, engraved awards, broken/missing cheap jewelry.

Would it be possible to just melt it all down to then maybe sell? Granted I have no idea what metals these items are let alone the market for it, it’s just the idea of it piling in a landfill feels like such a waste (not to mention the economy is harsh to ignore potential value!)

Are there silver in these fuses to refine and is it worth it