Silver Refining. Part 3

The participants of the third part are: a power source (in our case this wonderful pro-plater, basically an ordinary powerful power source), half of a 2L pop bottle, a tea filter (a coffee filter will also work, but as tea filter is more comfortable to use), a stainless steel fork, some insulating tape, a brass rod, and a thermo-shrink pipe (Its missing on the photo, but will soon appear :) ). The hero of last time's epic tale, the silver ingot, is gone, but instead, we replaced it with a silver blob. We thought it would be a more comfortable fit for a not-so-deep container.

 

We take a strip of pure silver, and weld it to the blob . We bend the end of the strip for better hangability.

 

Now we make two wonders of modern innovation. A cathode electrode made using the help of a fork, insulation tape, and some pliers and an anode stick, made by putting the thermo-shrink pipe on the brass rod. The pipes are cut, keeping in mind the distance in the center, and to the side, the center being where the blob is going to hang, and the end is where an alligator clip is going to be attached.


 


 This is how the complete piece looks. An electrolytic bath, in the pop bottle variant :) .
Attach the tea filter to the anode stick and hang the blob in the middle, and then check the conductivity between the rod and the blob.


 


This chemical jar contains the very first dose of silver nitrate, form the first part (32 gram of silver/80 grams of diluted nitric acid). We dilute the mixture with distilled water till we have 1L.


 


We submerge the cathode-fork into the electrolytic bath, and pour the silver nitrate in. We make sure that the silver nitrate doesn't touch the joint between the strip and the blob. The worst case scenario, the joint gets diluted, the blob falls down, and the reaction stops.


 


 We attach the minus electrode to the fork, the plus to the brass rod, and turn on the electricity. In the process we make sure that the voltage is between 4-8 volts, and the current doesn't surpass 5 amps. 


 

Right before your eyes, silver crystals start to grow. It is necessary to make sure that it doesn't grow to reach the tea filter, so that a short-circuit doesn't occur. Some people say that the reaction or growth of the crystals, goes 8 grams/amp , but in reality it goes slower, because part of the current goes to waste. The reaction is accompanied by an excretion of warmth, the blob dissolves, and crystals grow at the bottom of the electrolytic bath. The tea filter acts as a filter (obviously) for all the junk and slime, produced by the dissolving blob. 


 


When the reaction ends and the blob dissolves, we take apart the electrolytic bath, pour the silver nitrate into the chemical jar until the next use, rinse the newly born silver crystals in water a few times, then we filter and dry them. 


 


 After that we melt the silver and preform a normal water casting to acquire small sliver bits for any future projects. This silver that you see is .999 (pure) silver. We can now let out a sigh of relief, because there was a bit of fear while the silver was in a liquid state, because we could not touch it or see it.   :)


 


The calculation shows that we received around 473 grams of the 500 that was in the impure silver.


After diluting the silver in nitric acid, there are still some rouge fragments. The acid didn't dilute them and their make-up is unknown. :)





Until next time. :)