Big Boys Hobbies

Any home refiners?

Oldsjunkie

Oldsjunkie

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Came across a couple of well written tutorials on refining silver and gold at home. I'm going to order some 70% Nitric and "take care" of some of the newer sterling pieces I've picked up, both dug and bought cheaply on CL and sales and pour my own little bars. :excited:Anyone ever done this? Seems like a solution to giving up that percentage plus having to ship my stuff off to ARA and worry about it getting snatched from the mail, or getting shorted on a check. Here are the links to the tutorials.*

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread810904/pg1

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread812741/pg1

The first link is for silver, the second is for gold. There is one step in the gold process that is omitted in the step by step instructions involving dropping the powder and removing it from the inert solution, but is added in the comments I believe on the second page of comments. Their mods just aren't as spectacular as ours:D and never added it to the tutorial.

*I didn't write or participate in the writing of these tutorials. All credit goes to the OP of these tutorials on abovetopsecret.com. I can not and will not take any responsibility for any burns, explosions, lost PMs, lion attacks or locust swarms!:laughing: And for the love of Fruit Loops, if you don't feel confident using acid and blow torches, don't mess around with em!!! Good luck and HH!
 
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I didn't read your links, but one disadvantage to doing this is that your silver bars will be unknown purity to anyone you try to sell them to. The jewelry is marked "sterling" or "925" and a buyer would feel safer buying them like that. Of course, that may not matter to you.
 
I would never buy silver or gold that has been 'refined' in this manner.

At a minimum, you'll have to pay an assayers fee to sell it so you're back to square one.
 
Yeah, I've got no intentions of selling it. I'm someone who likes to learn and experiment with things, and this is a really interesting way to play around with chemistry/metallurgy without much risk. I'll make my own mold and have a cool keepsake that no-one else will have.:yes: It's not like this is voodoo magic anyway. It's simply removing the copper that is mixed into sterling/coin silver, so it can be called refined without the sarcastic quotes since that is, by definition, what refinement is...:p
 
I haven't done it with silver yet but I do that with gold. I started out with electronic scrap but that's such a dirty and time consuming process I only recover gold from plates , cups , bowls , etc that have gold decoration on them now , but any gold plated jewelry I find goes in there too...though I have to consume the base metals first. Any solid pieces of gold or silver is usually more valuable and easier to sell as is without refining.

I do small batches at a time and I save the purified gold in powder form. It takes a LOT of gold plate or flake to add up to anything , but I will keep saving it up and eventually melt the powder form into a nugget or bar , which will only improve its value considering where it came from.

As long as you aren't using it on high carat or solid pieces of gold , muriatic acid from a home improvement store or wal mart will work. But using ANY acid has its dangers and should only be done wearing the proper safety gear and in a well ventilated area....preferably outside. The instructions for using muriatic acid are easily found online in many places.


Ive recently been watching some videos of the silver process and I like how they precipitate silver out of a solution using copper. Its a really interesting thing to see.
 
ohiochris said:
I haven't done it with silver yet but I do that with gold. I started out with electronic scrap but that's such a dirty and time consuming process I only recover gold from plates , cups , bowls , etc that have gold decoration on them now , but any gold plated jewelry I find goes in there too...though I have to consume the base metals first. Any solid pieces of gold or silver is usually more valuable and easier to sell as is without refining.

I do small batches at a time and I save the purified gold in powder form. It takes a LOT of gold plate or flake to add up to anything , but I will keep saving it up and eventually melt the powder form into a nugget or bar , which will only improve its value considering where it came from.

As long as you aren't using it on high carat or solid pieces of gold , muriatic acid from a home improvement store or wal mart will work. But using ANY acid has its dangers and should only be done wearing the proper safety gear and in a well ventilated area....preferably outside. The instructions for using muriatic acid are easily found online in many places.


Ive recently been watching some videos of the silver process and I like how they precipitate silver out of a solution using copper. Its a really interesting thing to see.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize muriatic would work, just figured aqua regia was about the only option. I could definitely see it taking a ton of plate, but you can get plated material for all but nothing, so you're mostly out material and time. I had thought about doing this a few times, but never looked into it real deep. Definitely agree that precipitation with copper is fascinating. I'm ordering nitric this week and have probably three ounces worth of modern/broken sterling to play with. Gonna get some graphite and make a custom mold, so it should be a really fun and educational experience. HH!
 
Oldsjunkie said:
I didn't realize muriatic would work, just figured aqua regia was about the only option. I could definitely see it taking a ton of plate, but you can get plated material for all but nothing, so you're mostly out material and time. I had thought about doing this a few times, but never looked into it real deep. Definitely agree that precipitation with copper is fascinating. I'm ordering nitric this week and have probably three ounces worth of modern/broken sterling to play with. Gonna get some graphite and make a custom mold, so it should be a really fun and educational experience. HH!
Click to expand...



Aqua Regia , made from nitric is needed for dissolving high carat and solid gold. But very thin gold foils from anything gold plated can be dissolved pretty easily with muriatic acid and chlorine bleach together.....either process is dangerous nasty stuff. There are many steps to either process , so besides learning how to do it safely you also have to do a lot of research to know how to get it to work right. Its not too difficult , but one missed step or mistake can be costly.
 
Don't breathe any of that do it outside and with proper safety gear. As to selling it I do refine a bit and do sell it. I only melt things marked the same quality if it's gold I'll do a batch of only 10kt marked stuff so that the gold is all Same.
 
ohiochris said:
Aqua Regia , made from nitric is needed for dissolving high carat and solid gold. But very thin gold foils from anything gold plated can be dissolved pretty easily with muriatic acid and chlorine bleach together...it usually makes them quickly disappear into suspension , though you have to add a little purified water and heat to remove the chlorine so that the gold will precipitate out with sodium metabisulfite , which is a food preservative I usually buy at my local home brewing store. I don't know if muriatic can be used for silver though. There is not much gold on the stuff I am processing so it makes sense for me to do it this way to keep the cost down. The end result is still a very high carat gold though. Not much chance of making any money this way unless you have a ridiculously huge amount of material to process , but it is a fun and fascinating hobby , and it recovers gold that would normally wind up in a landfill never to be seen again.

I cant stress enough though that the acids and chemicals in either of these processes are wicked nasty stuff and have to be done very carefully and never indoors.
Click to expand...

For sure! I sure as hell don't take the nasties from chemical processes lightly. Learned my lesson spraying solvent based epoxies and lacquers over the years. I was referring to gold when I mentioned not realizing muriatic was an option. The silver nitrate precipitated out with copper is a pretty straight forward process. I may move onto some gold when I gather some more material besides the few 10K pieces I have around. I'm gonna hit up some estate sales and see what I can come up with on both the shiny white and yellow fronts. :D
 
Wheat Cent said:
Don't breathe any of that do it outside and with proper safety gear. As to selling it I do refine a bit and do sell it. I only melt things marked the same quality if it's gold I'll do a batch of only 10kt marked stuff so that the gold is all Same.
Click to expand...

DEFINATELY do it outside and don't breathe any of this stuff. VERY important.
 
Oldsjunkie said:
Yeah, I've got no intentions of selling it. I'm someone who likes to learn and experiment with things, and this is a really interesting way to play around with chemistry/metallurgy without much risk. I'll make my own mold and have a cool keepsake that no-one else will have.:yes: It's not like this is voodoo magic anyway. It's simply removing the copper that is mixed into sterling/coin silver, so it can be called refined without the sarcastic quotes since that is, by definition, what refinement is...:p
Click to expand...


The videos and reading Ive done lately on silver say the problem with trying to recover silver from silver plated items is that any copper/brass/etc. used in the host metal winds up in the solution and since its saturated with copper already there is no good way to use copper to get the silver out. One youtuber came up with a way to use electrolysis just long enough to get the silver to start peeling up from the host metal and then stop electrolysis and scrape as much of the silver off as you can , though this would be way more work than any sane person is willing to do. I don't know if there is a workaround for this problem or not but most experienced people are saying don't bother , its an almost impossible task.

Now it would be a different story if you know the host metal has no copper in it , I think. I just don't know if there is any other metal besides copper that would hinder the process. Its all about how the various metals react with each other at different stages and whether its possible to precipitate the silver in the end.
 
ohiochris said:
The videos and reading Ive done lately on silver say the problem with trying to recover silver from silver plated items is that any copper/brass/etc. used in the host metal winds up in the solution and since its saturated with copper already there is no good way to use copper to get the silver out. One youtuber came up with a way to use electrolysis just long enough to get the silver to start peeling up from the host metal and then stop electrolysis and scrape as much of the silver off as you can , though this would be way more work than any sane person is willing to do. I don't know if there is a workaround for this problem or not but most experienced people are saying don't bother , its an almost impossible task.

Now it would be a different story if you know the host metal has no copper in it , I think. I just don't know if there is any other metal besides copper that would hinder the process. Its all about how the various metals react with each other at different stages and whether its possible to precipitate the silver in the end.
Click to expand...

Where silver sits, I don't think it's worthwhile to try and mess with silver plate. You'd be in for a ton of time on top of the aggravation of hand scraping everything for sure. I could see *maybe* messing with it if you had nothing but time, but I gotta go pull all that lost sterling out of the ground sometime! I have a massive pile of 40% halves laying around too...:chemist:
 
Oldsjunkie said:
Where silver sits, I don't think it's worthwhile to try and mess with silver plate. You'd be in for a ton of time on top of the aggravation of hand scraping everything for sure. I could see *maybe* messing with it if you had nothing but time, but I gotta go pull all that lost sterling out of the ground sometime! I have a massive pile of 40% halves laying around too...:chemist:
Click to expand...

The 40% halves are probably worth more as they are than the amount of silver you get from them , but if you are doing it for the experience then you aren't as concerned about value. I thought about trying it on 30% war nickels ( wish I still had all of them I found and spent ) , but realistically....it would work out to costing a few dollars per nickel to get a nickels worth of silver out of them ( probably not accurate but just an example ). Even though I would like to try it , the math don't add up right :lol:

The math probably isn't much better with the gold I process but it sits better on my mind that I am recovering gold that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

There is a youtube channel called codys lab that you might find interesting. Among many other hobbies he does he extracts precious metals from obscure things like....silver from those little snap/pop things you throw on the ground , and platinum from dirt swept up from a freeway. He actually does make it work and its interesting to watch , but he ends up with so little that its not worth doing. There is a lot to be learned though just from watching his process.
 
ohiochris said:
The 40% halves are probably worth more as they are than the amount of silver you get from them , but if you are doing it for the experience then you aren't as concerned about value. I thought about trying it on 30% war nickels ( wish I still had all of them I found and spent ) , but realistically....it would work out to costing a few dollars per nickel to get a nickels worth of silver out of them ( probably not accurate but just an example ). Even though I would like to try it , the math don't add up right :lol:

The math probably isn't much better with the gold I process but it sits better on my mind that I am recovering gold that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

There is a youtube channel called codys lab that you might find interesting. Among many other hobbies he does he extracts precious metals from obscure things like....silver from those little snap/pop things you throw on the ground , and platinum from dirt swept up from a freeway. He actually does make it work and its interesting to watch , but he ends up with so little that its not worth doing. There is a lot to be learned though just from watching his process.
Click to expand...

They're raggedy beat up CRH 40%s, but they are cheap enough to play with. I'll check out that channel because it sounds really interesting, although I don't see myself trying THAT hard! The process is the coolest thing to me, and if I can at least break even on materials, I've had a ton of fun for free!:aok:
 
Oldsjunkie said:
They're raggedy beat up CRH 40%s, but they are cheap enough to play with. I'll check out that channel because it sounds really interesting, although I don't see myself trying THAT hard! The process is the coolest thing to me, and if I can at least break even on materials, I've had a ton of fun for free!:aok:
Click to expand...

That's kind of how I look at it too , as long as I am not paying an arm and a leg for the materials. I want to understand the process and I start seeing it as a challenge that I want to accomplish atleast once. That's why I got into gold panning even though there is no gold in my area except for tiny specks I have to work hard for. But its been a fun challenge so that makes it time well spent.
 
ohiochris said:
That's kind of how I look at it too , as long as I am not paying an arm and a leg for the materials. I want to understand the process and I start seeing it as a challenge that I want to accomplish atleast once. That's why I got into gold panning even though there is no gold in my area except for tiny specks I have to work hard for. But its been a fun challenge so that makes it time well spent.
Click to expand...

Sounds like we're on the same page here. I've done a little panning in my area, (a county near where I grew up that's known to have a little gold), and we really only have flour gold here. I found it to be a tedious, time consuming, yet rewarding experience. If I was in a nugget bearing area and running a big sluice I would probably feel better about the time spent to gather a little gold. Since I can't move to the mountains, I figure I better find the most rewarding experience for the time spent that I can while I have the chance.
 
Cool! I like this kind of thing...We used to make lost wax molds out of plaster and pour little animals and whatnot out of them...Heck, grew up to casting bullets and fishing gear and whatnot...so its SORT of the same concept, except for the acid and all...

I'd like to give this silver or gold a try...just on account of the fun factor and making something...Thanks!
Mud
 
My boss when I worked at a pawn shop had a bottle of acid that he used for testing gold items. He transferred it to a small bottle since it doesn't take much. One day he spilled some and everything in the room rusted within a few days. It's noting to take lightly.
 
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