silver processing

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Dummies Guide to EASY silver bullion refining at

home as a long term precious metal investment ,page 1

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Topic started on 18-2-2012 @ 11:36 PM by tauristercus

As informed ATS mermbers, I'm sure you're all perfectly aware of the extreme

volatility in the current global financial market and even more aware of how

our money buys less and less and less as the years go by. What's also very

apparent to those that watch the precious metals market e.g. silver and gold,

that contrary to the "value" of paper based currency which has been

continuously decreasing, that the "value" of silver and gold has been on a

continual increase.

Here's a couple of graphs showing the improvement of silver over the last 30

and 60 days.

Dummies Guide to EASY silver bullion refining at home as a long term ... http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread810904/pg1

1 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

Now over the last few years, I've been taking scrap, old, unwanted and

broken items containing silver and refining them in such a way as to end up

with essentially 99.9% silver bullion. Originally this was nothing more than a

home hobby of sorts but with the value of silver and gold bullion apparently

on an increasing trend, what started out as just a hobby has now become a

means of creating silver bullion as a long term investment. I get quite a kick

in checking the silver markets and watching the value of my silver slowly rise

And so I figured that now would be a perfect opportunity to share my

experience in silver bullion creation at home with other ATS members who

may have an interest.

Not only will you end up being able to create pure silver bullion of your own,

but you'll also see how ridiculously simple and easy the process is and that

the majority of equipment is easily obtainable and very inexpensive.

In fact, over the years I've simplified the entire process so that anyone can do

it. So why not read this tutorial and perhaps give it a go yourself.

If there's sufficient positive response, I'll consider doing a similar thread and

show once again how ridiculously easy it is to process and refine old, scrap,

broken, etc gold items into 99.9% 24k gold ingots at home using essentially

the same basic and inexpensive equipment used to produce silver bullion.

Just to whet your appetite, here's a pic of some pure silver bullion "buttons"

that I've made:

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2 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

and here's a pic of a 24k gold button (8 gms) I made earlier today ... and

worth approx. $US443 at todays market rates ... hopefully next week will be

worth a bit more

Interested ?

Ok, let's start processing silver !

We need some basic equipment which consists of a plastic water spray bottle,

a plastic spoon, a plastic "swizzle" stick, a plastic "turkey baster" pipette and

a small plastic funnel.

All these items were purchased at one of those "cheap" stores for just a few

dollars only.

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3 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

We need a couple of small glass cylinders and in my case, I used some

"empty" spice jars from the kitchen. At least that's what I told my wife

Also need a small glass bowl able to stand up to boiling water and that will

allow one of the spice jars to be placed upright in it. The boiling water poured

into the bowl will help heat the contents of the spice jar.

We will also need some cheap disposable plastic gloves such as the ones used

for food handling.

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4 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

We'll also need some coffee filters. Again, both of these items were purchased

at the "cheap" store for a couple of dollars.

The next item that we'll need is a bottle of 70% strength Nitric acid. This is

readily obtainable from the majority of chemical supply companies which

you'll have no problems in finding in your local yellow pages. A 500 ml bottle

will be quite adequate.

The nitric acid is used to dissolve the silver and any other contaminating

metals in the silver such as copper, etc. We need to eventually remove the

contaminants leaving behind pure silver for final processing.

At this point, a couple of WARNINGS are required, so PLEASE PAY

ATTENTION.


5 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

Nitric acid, by it's nature is a powerful corrosive acid and skin contact should

be avoided. When working with it, you should ALWAYS be wearing those

disposable plastic gloves that we purchased earlier.

Simple care, caution and common sense is all that's needed and you'll be

perfectly safe. In all the years that I've been refining silver and gold for a

hobby and using nitric acid, not once has there been an issue or concern. If

any is spilled on a surface, just immediately rinse off with plain water.

Also, small quantities of nitrogen dioxide gas is produced so ALWAYS do the

refining outside in the open air.

The motto is: "Be careful and be safe".

But let me reiterate one more time ... if you exercise common sense and basic

care, this entire procedure is perfectly safe. Again, I've been doing this for

quite a few years with NO mishaps whatsoever.

And to complete our refining "kit", we need someway of melting the raw silver

into the shiny metal that people have lusted after for millenia

Thankfully, all we need to do is head to the nearest hardware store and get

something along the lines of this badboy ... a propane powered torch. This is

the one I use because it has a self-igniting switch built in, so no need to use

matches to get it going. Also has a rotary button to control the strength of the

flame. No problems whatsoever in finding one as they're a common

handyman item and it easily melts silver and gold.

Well, thats it ... that's all the simple equipment that we need to start

producing our very own 99.9% pure silver bullion and then watching it

appreciate over time !

And as you can see, all of it is extremely easy to find.


6 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

As for the material containing silver that will be processed, sure you could use

old bits of silver jewelry or anything else that you've got lying around with a

reasonable silver content. But personally, I found the simplest way to get all

my "raw silver items" is in the form of old coins containing silver and

purchased on eBay. Quite often you can get some really good deals.

As an example, last week I purchased a half kilo of out of circulation

Australian sixpence coins dating back to the 40's, 50's and 60's. By

themselves as coins, they're worth next to nothing and don't have much

intrinsic value. But each one of the coins has a 50% silver / 50% copper

makeup that makes them a perfect source of silver. Sure beats trying to dig it

out of the ground the hard way

Ok, for the purpose of this tutorial, lets process 2 of those coins and recover

the pure silver from them.

The coins weigh in total 6 gms but because they're a 50/50 mix of

silver/copper, the actual amount of silver works out to be 3 gms.

To recover the silver component, we need to completely dissolve the 2 coins

in a 50/50 mixture of nitric acid and water. The amount of nitric acid required

will be approximately 17mls mixed with approximately 17 mls of water. Using

the plastic pipette, the water is added first followed by the nitric acid.


7 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

Continued next post ...

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:37 PM by tauristercus

Continued from previous post ...

Almost immediately, you'll see a bubbling reaction begin and the liquid start to

change colour from clear to a very pretty blue shade. This blue colour is due to the

copper in the coins reacting with the nitric acid to produce copper nitrate.

Also, brown vapours of nitrogen dioxide will also form.

WARNING Nitrogen dioxide is a NASTY, NASTY, NASTY gas and under no

circumstances should you breathe it in. As mentioned earlier, do all this refining in

the open air and you'll be perfectly ok.

To speed up the reaction, we can place the glass tube into a bath of boiling hot

water. As the bath water cools, replace with fresh, boiling water.

Now, we sit back and let the reaction continue until both coins have been


8 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

completely dissolved leaving behind just a brilliant blue liquid.

When the coins are completely dissolved, we need to dilute this blue liquid a bit so

add an equal volume of water.

Next, we need to remove any sediment by pouring this blue liquid through a filter

into the 2nd of our glass jars.

Here's how to create a suitable filter using one of the coffee filters.

1. Use a round lid to mark out a circular pattern on the filter.

2. Cut out the circular shape.

3. Fold the circular filter in half ... then fold in half again.

4. Carefully open up the filter and you'll find it should fit easily into the plastic

funnel.


9 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

Place the funnel and filter into the opening of the 2nd (empty) glass jar and

carefully pour the blue liquid into the funnel, allowing it to drip through.


10 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

By the way, you ARE wearing your plastic gloves, aren't you ? If you splash the

blue liquid onto skin you'll get a harmless black discoloration that will take about 4

days to wear off. So wear your gloves !! That black discoloration is caused by silver

in the blue liquid reacting to light and darkening ... the basis of how photographic

film works :-)

Should have taken my own advice

Ok, we want to get every last bit of silver so once the liquid has finished running

through the filter paper, use the plastic water spray bottle and spray the inside

surface of the filter to ensure that all the blue solution has passed through the

filter.

So here we have a jar containing the filtered blue liquid with all our silver dissolved

in it. But how do we get the liquid to release the dissolved silver back as a solid

material ? Well, it just so happens that when a piece of solid copper is placed into


11 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

the blue liquid, copper atoms in the solid copper and silver atoms in the blue liquid

immediately start to exchange places. The solid copper begins to slowly dissolve

and a grey, foam-like material begins to appear and fall to the bottom of the glass

tube.

This grey material is pure silver ! Wooohoooo !

A small copper cylinder would do the job nicely but for our purposes, I'm simply

going to use an old electrical power cable like the one that plugs into a computer or

a kettle, etc and strip out one of the copper wires. Then I'll wind the copper wire

around a pencil to create a rough helix shape.

Take this piece of copper wire and drop it into the glass jar containing the filtered

blue liquid.

Within seconds, you should see a grey, foam-like material begin to coat the wire.

When it gets heavy enough, it will detach from the wire and fall to the bottom of

the jar and more will start to form. Otherwise a slight shake of the jar should be

sufficient to dislodge it.


12 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

If the copper wires dissolves completely, then add another similar piece of copper

wire and repeat until there is no further grey material visible on the wire. This

means that virtually all the silver has been removed from the blue solution and

should now be at the bottom of the glass jar in the form of a grey sediment.

Now we're going to "wash" the grey material to remove all traces of remaining blue

liquid.

We'll prepare another filter as we did before and fit it into the plastic funnel. Now

the funnel is placed into the original glass jar that we dissolved the coins in and

very slowly and carefully, the blue liquid and grey sediment is poured into the

funnel. We want to let the filter catch every last bit of grey sediment.


13 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

When done, the water spray bottle will be used to spray the grey sediment in the

filter until the water coming out of the bottom of the funnel is clear.

All of the liquid in the glass jar can now be tipped into a bucket, diluted with lots of

water and then can be safely discarded by pouring down the sink drain ... no

damage will occur.

Continued next post ...

edit on 18/2/12 by tauristercus because: (no reason given)


Continued from previous post ...

The filter is removed from the funnel, opened out carefully so it's flat ... then left

until the grey material has completely dried.


14 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

This grey material is our "raw" 99.9% pure silver ... ready for the final step to

change it back into that nice shiny silver metal.

Ok, we're finally at the finishing post !

Normally when melting precious metals such as silver and gold, a proper crucible

made of heat resistant material is used. Such a material is designed to withstand

the approximate 1000C temperature required to melt silver and gold.

However, we're going to go low tech in our approach and instead of a high temp

crucible, we're going to use a potato placed ontop of a brick ... yep, you read that

correctly .. we're going to use a potato upon which we're going to melt our grey

powder back into silver metal ! Believe it or not, but a slice of potato can easily and

for long enough, withstand the sort of temperatures we need to melt silver.

A slice of potato is all thats needed and we need to slightly carbonize (burn) the

surface. The carbon helps pick up any miniscule impurities remaining in the silver

and also the carbon layer helps prevent the silver from adhering to the potato.

Now, we take a small quantity of our grey powder and place it on the potato

surface. We do a small quantity at a time as it takes less time to melt and once

melted, we continue adding additional small quantities and re-melt. This continues

until all the grey powder has been used.


15 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

Eventually all the grey powder has been melted down.

And we're left holding a "button" of 99.9% pure silver to be added with the rest of

our "long term investment" portfolio of silver "buttons".


16 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

The above may have been long winded in explanation but I wanted to make sure

that every step of the process was as clear as possible making it easy for anyone

interested enough to have a go at themselves.

Summarized, the process is simply:

1. dissolve the scrap silver completely in nitric acid

2. filter the resulting blue solution to remove impurities

3. use a piece of copper to "drop" the silver as a grey powder

4. melt the grey powder back into metallic silver

If there's sufficient positive response, then I'll certainly consider creating a thread

on how to produce 99.9% 24k gold at home ... it's almost as easy as producing

silver. edit on 18/2/12 by tauristercus because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:44 PM by el1jah

:bowdown:

I`ll probably never use this knowledge, but thankyou for taking the time, I enjoyed

reading all that for some reason lol super interesting.

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:47 PM by Bilder

Fantastic thread ,I didnt know it was that easy in fact im going to try this for

myself,if you dont mind me asking what did the bag of old coins cost


17 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:48 PM by anthonygillespie2012

Great money making idea for yourself, is that a blowtorch your using for the fire?edit on 18-2-2012 by anthonygillespie2012 because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:52 PM by LightSpeedDriver

reply to post by tauristercus

A very cool thread OP! I'm more a silver lover than a gold lover too, I only have 2

pieces of jewellery and they are both silver.

1 question. I know that the price of silver is usually more stable and constant than

that of gold but how much did the coins cost you compared to the value of the

silver contained within them? Would it be possible for more of us to use that as a

way of supplementing our income?


reply to post by Bilder

I paid approximately $AUS 20 for the half kilo bag.

It certainly pays to keep an eye out on eBay as quite often really good bargains

show up which are worth snapping up.

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:54 PM by Alchemst7

Awsome Demo!! I have about 45gm of 14k jewelry gold that I melted down and

want to refine it. Can this same method be used with gold? What other metals are

mixed in 14k gold? (copper, silver, nickel)? Also, what do you do with the remaining

Nitric Acid solution with copper in it? are you able to refine the copper from the

solution?

I just looked up the cost of nitric acid here in San Diego 1L cost around $30 -

45...How much Nitric acid would be used to disolve those 2 coins?edit on 19-2-2012 by Alchemst7 because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 18-2-2012 @ 11:55 PM by anthonygillespie2012

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver

That's a good question


18 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM


Originally posted by anthonygillespie2012

Great money making idea for yourself, is that a blowtorch your using for the fire?

edit on 18-2-2012 by anthonygillespie2012 because: (no reason given)

It's a propane torch available at almost every hardware store.

It easily generates a flame capable of very quickly melting silver and gold.

In the tutorial, it took approximately 60 secs in total to convert all that grey powder

back into metallic silver.

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:00 AM by tauristercus

Originally posted by LightSpeedDriver


A very cool thread OP! I'm more a silver lover than a gold lover too, I only have 2 pieces of

jewellery and they are both silver.

Would it be possible for more of us to use that as a way of supplementing our income?

I suppose it would. I'm certainly looking at the long term silver market and

expecting to see quite reasonable increases in silver value over the next say 2, 5 or

10 years. Silver is NOT a renewable resource, what's in the ground is all there ever

will be and considering that silver is sought after in huge quantities by the

electronic industries and as jewelry, it stands to reason that there'll be less and less

of it available over time thereby driving the price up.

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:01 AM by anthonygillespie2012


I would like to try this myself just for the fun thanks for the info, are there any

dangers involved making them? I have never created anything like this before but

really want to give it a try as long as nothing poisonous kills me or something blows

up. I noticed your wearing gloves.edit on 19-2-2012 by anthonygillespie2012 because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:01 AM by davespanners

Really interesting thread!

A few questions though.

How much does that blob of silver in your hand weigh at the end of the process?

How much did the chemicals and materials cost so you could do this i.e. the acid,

gas, filters, gloves ?


19 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

How long did the process take you from start to finish? including the time buying

the coins on ebay, prepping etc

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:02 AM by usmc0311

That is cool. I have been interested in doing this for some time. Now I know where

to start. I will be looking forward to a thread about gold as well. Thanks

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:06 AM by GaVinCe

That's impressive.. I certainly didn't think you could do that.. Thanks.. BTW, when

heating the powder at the end, can you use something other than that blow torch

thing? Don't think I can get hold of one of them so easily, lol..

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:07 AM by dainoyfb

I love your choice of forum to post this in.

Please do continue on with the gold process too.

I was thinking you could do every part of this process except the last and store it in

a urn. Nobody would ever know to steal/confiscate it.

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:08 AM by tauristercus

Originally posted by Alchemst7

Awsome Demo!! I have about 45gm of 14k jewelry gold that I melted down and want to

refine it. Can this same method be used with gold? What other metals are mixed in 14k

gold? (copper, silver, nickel)? Also, what do you do with the remaining Nitric Acid solution

with copper in it? are you able to refine the copper from the solution?

Because gold is a relatively soft metal, it's usually mixed with quantities of silver

and other various common metals such as copper to give it more of a hardness.

24 carat gold is almost pure gold

18 carat gold is approximately 75% gold and 25% other less valuable metals

9 carat gold is approximately 37% gold and 63% other less valuable metals.

That 14gms of 14k gold contains approximately 58% gold which works out to

approximately 8gms of 24k gold and 6 gms of other metals.

At current market gold rates, that 8ms of gold when extracted should be worth

around $US 440.

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:12 AM by LightSpeedDriver

reply to post by anthonygillespie2012

Nitric acid is used in the process. This is something that a great deal of respect and


20 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

attention must be shown when handling. It will strip paint from a door, exude nasty

fumes in the process and possibly give you some serious explaining to do when a

significant other comes home.


Perhaps a more practical question. Don't people look at you funny when you come

in "off the street" with silver purer than is generally used in coin-making or

jewellery? "Are ya making this at home there are ya Joe?" edit on 19/2/12 by LightSpeedDriver because: Added a reply

reply posted on 19-2-2012 @ 12:17 AM by anthonygillespie2012

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver

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21 of 21 20-Feb-12 10:29 AM

silver processing

Documents

rethinking

sufficient

filtered blue

cool thread

long term

grey powder

14k jewelry

small quantity