So im interested going into this as a hobby and of course some income, the former more. Not expecting to get rich from it ofc. Anyone have experience with it? Where to find suppliers for it? I been trying alibaba. Keep finding lots of results, contacted a bunch of them, asking about their stock, i keep getting the same type of response. They ignore the stock question repeatedly and keep asking for my email address over and over again as if they are trying to collect leads or i dont know what.

Whats with it? Would love for some directions, im in Asia if that matters

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Well, I tried my hand at refining silver with a friend and had moderate success but have a lot of questions. We made mistakes, learned from them, and gathered a lot of data for future attempts. I started this thread earlier and got the lowdown on tin and metastannic acid: https://www.reddit.com/r/PreciousMetalRefining/comments/1c1g75f/how_much_nitric_acid_70_for_silvertin_alloy/

In it, I got a lot of information on how to counter the tin. Some of it we used HCL and some we didn't. Here's why:

In the linked thread in the above thread, Harold stated incinerating with an HCL wash was the way to go. What does "wash" mean here? Our first step was to melt the raw material and drop it into water to make flakes. Once we did that, I submerged 300g of it in Muriatic acid. There was a slow reaction with some bubbles and the solution turned bright yellow. I didn't know if I was supposed to wait for the reaction to complete or just the initial introduction was enough. We didn't mess with it for the rest of the day. It's still very slowly reacting. Am I supposed to wait until the reaction is done, or just a quick "wash" is all that's needed?

Now onto the other stuff. We wanted to do a test to see if the metastannic acid would produce a paste as expected and possibly see if some kind of filtering would work. Placing the flakes (again, no HCL wash on this stuff) created the expected reaction and created a cloudy blue solution. We made some mistakes here but ultimately got the acid to material mix to the point it was no longer reacting. The beaker had a layer of white sludge on the bottom and the rest was a very cloudy light blue. We set it aside to allow it to settle and slowly (too slowly) it did so. We decided to speed the process by decanting through a cotton filter and washing with distilled water. We finally got it working and the solution looked a bit more clear. No gunk on the bottom. It's worth noting that we moved most to a fresh beaker to filter. We still had the other one with the white gunk in it and allowed it to sit.

Anyway, once we got the solution filtered (not sure if it did anything TBH) we had a nice blue solution and we introduced a copper bar to it. Immediately tons of silver formed and fell off. Like a LOT of it. Long story short, we washed, melted and cast a little bit. I used a silver scratch test on it and it was above sterling silver but below the bright red "pure" silver. Assuming I can trust the test.

Some questions: How do I use the HCL to "wash" and how long should it take? Thoughts on the cloudy solution? Is it the metastannic acid from the tin? Will having it present in the solution lead to less pure silver? If not, what can we do to increase the silver purity? Did we not wash it enough? Something else?

Thanks for all your help in the previous thread and thanks in advance for any tips going forward. We still have more than a kilo left of the initial incinerated flakes to refine. Today was a test run and in that it was very successful. Thanks!

I've found some estimates for pure silver, but I'm working with an alloy that's 60% silver and around 40% tin. Can someone point me to the calculation needed or give their best approximation?

Appreciate any help, thanks!

Hi everyone, I'm new here but I am going to attempt to refine about 100 grams of white gold jewelry to collect the palladium from it. The jewelry will be a mix of 10k (30% of total), 14k(55%), and 18k(15%), and I will keep track of them in case one karat produces more than others. Does anyone have any experience with how much palladium I should expect to recover? I'm going to in-quart the gold with silver and dissolve it with nitric, then drop the palladium out with dimethylglyoxime. Any suggestions or additional info would be much appreciated!

I blasted some flatpacks with a torch and crushed them. Can anyone tell me what I'm looking at? Is this just silicate/glass? It looks metalic but breaks so easy...

1. Метод высокотемпературного рафинирования: это более распространенный метод рафинирования.При обработке палладия углеродом при высокой температуре и при определенных условиях нагрева металлический палладий плавится, а углерод сгорает, тем самым отделяя чистый металлический палладий.

2. Метод химического растворения: в этом методе используется специальный растворитель для растворения углерода и отделения металлического палладия от углерода палладия.Обычно используемые растворители включают цианид натрия или соляную кислоту.

3. Металлургический метод: это еще один широко используемый метод рафинирования.Углеродный палладий смешивается с другими металлическими сплавами или оксидами металлов, и в процессе плавки и рафинирования металлический палладий отделяется от других примесей.

4. Окислительно-восстановительный метод: контролируя условия реакции палладия с углеродом и кислородом или другими окислителями, металлический палладий окисляется до оксида палладия, а затем восстанавливается до металлического палладия посредством реакции восстановления для достижения рафинирования.

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I’m curious if you can add material that is silver plated into the anode basket to pull the silver off in a silver cell? Is that feasible to do or worth the time?

I have tried cutting the handles open with a dremel and peeling off the silver. Dangerous and obnoxious.

I have tried smashing them along the seam with a hammer and then peeling them off. I keep hurting my fingers.

I have tried bolt cutters to split the metal. It requires BIG ones and it is super clumsy. Plus it wears me out.

I have tried using my torch to heat them until the handle falls off. Works on wax/tar ones, but not cement (which is most of them).

After being sick and damn tired of wasting hours and hours and hours once a month sitting down with a bucket full of Sterling handled knives and trying different techniques to get the handles off I said fuck it and decided to see exactly why people don't just stick them in nitric acid.

So I did.

I grabbed my tall form 2L beaker and put five knives down in there and added 500mL of distilled water and juuuuust enough nitric to get er dun.

Mission Accomplished! It quickly and completely dissolved the silver!!! Yaaaaaaay ... but ....

I have spent the last five hours filtering the ACTUAL cement (not silver cement, lol) thru my buchner. EIGHT filters, it took, to get the super duper fine mud out of my solution.

I am cementing that silver out now and am most likely going to melt it back into shot and redissolve it because there's no way that shit is going thru my silver cell without contaminating it.

#DON'T BE LIKE ME.

Ultimately I'm going back to the bolt cutter method, and then hammering them to break the cement.

I've seen some of sreetips videos with his silver cell build and process.. not seen many but what I've seen the source is either silver cement from a bag or melting jewelry said from estate sales and what not. Is that silver cement bought? And where from?

If you could entertain a thought experiment, how feasible might this be? 3d printing coins of family members faces and casting them?

A friend into blacksmithing has a furnace and casts things. My first thought was to buy some 90% coins to remelt and cast. Then I saw the silver cell build videos and curiousity got the best of me.

Figured I'd be roasted less here than at gold refining forum

Hello I have some knife handles that I believe are sterling when I acid test the top layer with silver testing acid it turns blood red but when I cut into the metal and test with silver acid it turns blue. So I tried my 18k acid on it and it still turns blue. I tried my 18k acid on some material that I know is sterling and it turns blue as well are these knife handles most likely sterling?

Someone mentioned that you can get about 1-3 grams of gold off of pins. I have probably 3-4 kg of gold plated beryllium pins. Anyone have any advice how to get off the gold? I tried nitric and doesn’t touch it. Thanks ahead of time

What metals are in this? Came from a dental lab.

There is some weird crystal growth on the copper, Im glad I didn’t use more gold because apparently I have no idea what Im doing

Greetings all (previous post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PreciousMetalRefining/comments/1b05g3d/help/ ), I took some of your advice and diluted my solution along with adding a few pieces of copper piping. Unfortunately, I got no noticeable precipitation. Would it be advisable to boil down the solution and restart by making aqua regia from actual nitric acid rather than NaNO3? Or should I just add NaOH and smelt the precipitate from that? Earlier I attempted to add 20:5 ml HCl/Nitric and it produced a white crystalline precipitate which I believe to be urea nitrate.

Dissolved approximately 10g gold into HCl+NaNO3 and attempted to neutralize with urea and precipitate with SMB. I saw no reaction and am wondering what I did wrong.