Silver Refining. Part 2

Our next step is aquiring silver cement.
We will materialise the silver from the silver nitrate, with copper.
Cu+2AgNO3-->2Ag+Cu(NO3)2
We take the silver nitrate which we made in Part 1 (note, the bluer the silver nitrate, the more copper it contains, so the lighter it is, the better) and then add in some copper. As a source of copper, we take old copper pipes, and reuse them. Before use, we clean them till they shine, no solder allowed.



After adding in the copper, the reaction goes rather quickly, as a result of the reaction, it heats up,  further increasing the rate at which the reaction goes. This photo shows what happens to the copper, a few minutes after it gets put in the silver nitrate.



Silver cement starts to materialise on the copper pipes after a minute. This is silver, in a powder-like state. The pipes act as a source of copper, and feed the silver nitrate and the remanents of the acid, deacreasing them gradualy, till they fully dissapear. To keep up the pace of the process, we brush the materialized silver back into the mixture.




If your pipes have been fully dissolved, just get more. With the extraction of the silver from the silver nitrate, the reaction slows down, and thus the container can be left to stand for a day or 2. You only need to make sure that there's still copper in the jar, and so that no foreign objects get into the mixture. When you see that the process has come to a halt, which when stopped, will be cold with no signs of a reaction, with blue liquid at the top, and a layer of silver cement at the bottom, you can begin filtering the silver cement. On the photo, the process is incomplete, as there is still little particles of silver floating around in the blue mixture.





We start the filtration. We will need a funnel, some coffee filters, and a jar, where the liquid is going to go. 













After we have filtered the cement the first time, we repeat the process with water, until the water coming out of the filter is clear, and you have washed out the remnants of the copper nitrate from the silver cement. After the filtration of the cement is complete, the excess moisture has to evaporate, either through natural means, or assisted means.


 


In the mixture left after the filtration, silver is still present. Since we are greedy economical people, and also for scientific purposes, we will try to extract more silver from it later. We add in some table salt, and leave it for a while, so that the silver chloride settles to the bottom of the mixture.


 


 After the cement drys, we melt it in an old melting crucible, and since the cement still has some contamination left, this crucible will not be used for any further work with non-contaminated silver. Since this is silver cement, you have to melt it equally and slowly, because if you rush, silver dust particles will out of the crucible.


 

Without any complications, we simply pour the melted silver into water, and thus acquiring silver material for future work.


  


 I'll explain why we don't just melt it into an ingot right away. 
This silver is not the end product, and isn't pure .999 silver, but still contains faults, and is around .980 in purity. We still need to melt it into an ingot, for electrolysis. It is more effective to first make silver bits first, to later take the required amount to make an ingot. The photo displays an ingot made with the first fruits of our success. This is only 150 grams of the 2 pounds of contaminated silver. The rest is undergoing the same process.


 

The second part is completed successfully, boringly, and with a lot of knowledge acquired. :)