I think just smelting it down with some flux in a large graphite crucible in a gas furnace would get you to one or two nines fine. Most of the impurities would be skimmed off as slag before the pour. It could be further refined electrolytically, like the silver cell. Too much time for too little $ return tho.
@@travismiller5548 the return is worth it if you have enough to do one big refinement. Judging by the comment section it would certainly get some view $ as well.
In my opinion it's more the $40 bucks simple remove the iron with a magnet. As you know copper is not magnetic. So suspended in water use the magnet and bingo 999 copper. And yes it's worth aprx $80 a pound. , if not more. As you have refined the copper already during your process . Keep it to mix with bronce zink aluminium and rest gold to make carat gold for jewellery making. I think that will be a good use for the rest couple you've got sreetips
I still think it would be worthwhile and kinda fun to melt down the copper/iron mixture into a bar/alloy. Idk if would it take very long, but it would be interesting to see the result. You could stamp it and sell it on ebay for viewers that can't afford to buy your gold bars.
yes! help him reach that 1 tonne goal. =b every time I hear sreetips say copper waste I'm like nooooooo! BigStackD's little dogs are whining! He digs through trash for copper treasure. Help a brudda out, sreedips! =)
Ive been watching and weighting and on my way home from work you slipped one in on me thanks Sreetips quite a few of your viewers including myself have been watching and weighting.
The amount of rough copper bars sold on eBay would argue against no-one doing it, but they may have more time on their hands. Either way, I think it's very wasteful to just chuck it away.
He didn't say no one does it, he said refiners don't do it. It's a waste product in the refining process and it's highly contaminated with iron and other metals.
@@SMOBY44 If the major contaminant is iron, couldn't you chuck in some muriatic acid , dissolve the more reactive metals like iron, decant and wash the bucket and then smelt some bars of "mainly copper" :) ? I bet you could re-use it too once the iron is removed.
For the copper powder. Since you are building a large furnace have you just considered smelting it to bars? the iron should slag out and increase purity. then sell it for scrap copper price. recuperate some cost. Powder in a forge should melt quick and have low cost in propane.
cool sir self participation look awesome , my self never played with platinum yet and agree you have to extra cautious with hot solutions well done nice show sir👍😀👍
I was thinking maybe you could boil off all the liquid to retain more of the black powder? This is really cool and I wish I had the opportunity to try this myself.
That didn't look like fun. I was expecting that you were going to Buchner funnel filter the Platinum right after the Platinum dropped out of solution. Then boiling hot distilled water like when you're rinsing cement silver to contain the solids. I have to agree. When working with 2 boiling hot liquids as well as doing large precious metal pours. Theirs a (Finkster) factor that one has during the process. L0L. I truly enjoy your honest content in refining Sir. Best wishes and God bless.
Auracle make Gold and Platinum testing devices that cost around $500. I don't know if that is in your budget, but it's a great indicator if you are successful in your refining process.
Man oh man platinum is not worth the headache. I was feeling your frustration and fright with the hot solutions. Acid can be bad enough but add heat no thank you.
Sreetips, you cud also heat the copper in your furnace, 800 or 900•C just below the melting point of the copper, let it cool naturally , add oxygen. Rust the iron out. Iron oxide. Bingo pur copper. Be an interesting experiment to watch. If you dont want to do it, maybe you cud ask Cody of Cody's lab to coop with you. Like I said it would be an interesting video and would opeese many lol
I was thinking the same, shame to waste the copper. I looked at the spot price and pure copper was $3.61 a pound. He said he had about 65 lbs. = $234. He's not going to get full spot for it so lets be generous and say he gets $200. Factor in the time and gas used to melt it and it really isn't worth it. Wonder if a scrapper would take the powder, probably not.
I know it doesn't seem worth it, but it's possible people would pay a premium for a 1oz Streetips copper bar that makes it worth it. :) Some of us love Streetips videos but can't afford silver or gold bar as a keepsake. :)
With the ammunition shortage; there are a lot of gun owners that are hand loading their shells. You may have a market for your copper mud and waste copper. The quality of the copper isn’t as important for bullets as it is with piping or conductors. Smelt it into ingots or even mold popular calibers that are in high demand. I, myself am looking for copper buckshot. Solid copper shot shells, rifle, and pistol rounds are fetch a premium, factory loaded. If interested, contact me. I’d be happy to negotiate a price for the raw material.
Instead of writing Sreetips everywhere to protect yourself, you can embed your video with any writings, including Streetips. It’s an easy process, Google it. Once and for all.
Watermarks can be blurred or cropped. Writing on objects means it is on all sorts of angles and is basically impossible to remove without destroying the content.
I have never refined any metal in my life and I watch these videos out of curiosity, so this might be an idiotic question. But would it be possible to boil the water off to get to the platinum powder?
I thought exactly the same .... I mean, probably gonna take a lot more time but once the water dries out it would remain only the platinum powder.... I guess...
I tend to have too much time on my hands, and am unnaturally patient lol I'd be a good candidate for processing such copper wastes. Because even if I only made a dollar, I'd do it! 😈😂 Not to mention my fondness for "Red gold" 🤩 Even if I lost a few bucks, I now melt the stuff in my spare time for casting.
@@sreetips I can appreciate that. I have ideas frequently I know I'll never find the time for. Time is certainly a precious thing. More so than gold or platinum. We can only do the best we can with the time we've got ;) I sure hope you don't think I was boasting. I work a part time job while waiting to advance within my company. It's a good company in the long run. And I currently enjoy the extra time it allows me. Just know that I don't think ill of you for the "Waste" of your copper. After all, one mans junk is another mans treasure. That will never change. I'm far from perfect and throw out things that I'm sure another person would find valuable. And I definitely get how precious time is, and allocating it efficiently is VERY important at times.
maybe there is a special type of centrifuge, I don't know if they make one for larger containers but I bet there is someone whose thought of an answer to the settling problem...
@@sreetips what was the hardest part? I know the neutralization was scary but I think you just used too much highly concentrated acid. And the black platinum particles in solution looked like they were way too fine to settle out, they probably formed a suspension. I would avoid washing the granulate that way until you can convert it to another form or do a more aggressive centrifugation
You should recycle the copper nitrate to recover nitric acid and clean copper. No need to go through the iron cementing, neutralizing with caustic soda, PH balancing and final filtering. It can save you a ton of time and money, the procedure is relatively quick and simple. Check out the NurdRage channel where he shows the whole process.
Instead of throwing away your copper waste. I wish you would take that copper waste material and melt it in a propane Devil-forge and make some large ingots to be sold on Ebay. We would love to see that but I know there's only so many hours in a day but a boy can dream right???
24:55 I think the only viable option at that point would be boil to dryness. Surprised the centrifuge didnt work its almost like its a colloid. Or are they just nano particles? Isnt the brown gold nano particles? That separates just fine, is this stuff just that much finer?
That's really a cool thing about chemistry.. You can be flawless in stoicheometric theory but if you haven't got specific reaction knowledge you're nowhere. Probably the reason you are always one of my top 5 channels . For instance... try and predict the colour of a random salt percipitate. intriguing.
Can't I use sefric acid to desolves the aluminum an lead cuz I smelted gold with aluminum n lead an so I put it in sufric acid I think it desolves the aluminum n lead an what left behind would be gold n silver right
Ive never done this and really don't know the answer to the problem but say you rinse twice letting it settle out completely in between so you get the most you can, why not just evaporate the water off?
I wonder if mixing in some finely powdered activated charcoal at the end would absorb all of the stubborn platinum nano particles and then be able to burn off cleanly to not contaminate the end product.
It seemed odd to me that black platinum powder wouldn’t quickly settle to the bottom in a solution of distilled water. I was under the impression that the platinum did settle to the bottom, and the rest of that black ink was something else that formed during the reduction. But I could be totally wrong about that. Great video, I really enjoyed it!
I heard that cast copper bars are 4 times more valuable to stackers than scrap copper (20$/kg). Your cement copper is probably mainly "contaminated " with Zinc and Nickel and I estimate it's in a couple of percent rate that would form a nice alloy you still may call copper. I think Iron and Copper as an alloy is a bad combination. There are many metal casting youtubers these days.
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting, and it also seems to be quite a frustrating process! I have to assume there is a more reliable industrial process for large scale refining?
Can you instead start with the base and then add the acid. Seems like you would use less base. Like you add the acid which is a low pH and then you are adding base to raise the pH a little bit.
I’d take that copper waste in that bucket and melt it down. Let me know. It would make a fun video where everyone could get to see what happens. Edit: BTW Maryland here. Not sure your locale but even if your not nearby I’d be up for a road trip to help you have a productive place to rid your copper waste rather than just throwing it out.
i would think that yo could electroplate out the cooper any platinum grope metels would be a slime at the bottom of the electroplate cell and the iron would stay in solution as iron salts and coule either be used as fertilizer or disposed down a drain as non toxic waste liquid.
Melt the copper waste into thin plates and use in a copper refining cell. Or sell it cheap to someone who will. I'm not sure what you mean by chucking it, but it seems a waste of copper.
There is a guy on RU-vid that distilled his copper nitrate solution instead of cementing out the copper.... gives the ability for him to reuse nitric acid
also, industrially copper is refined electrolytically, just like the way you purify your silver, so I wonder if you could do that with your copper waste, it shouldn't be any more trouble than silver which you seem to tolerate. Perhaps in the same way that copper even though more reactive than silver doesn't plate out on the cathode (as long as concentration remains low enough), maybe iron might similarly not plate out on the cathode (as long as its concentration remains low enough). and don't say it isn't "worth" it, its a hobby !!!
Wish I had the time, my precious metals backlog stifles any thoughts that I might have of trying to refine copper. I find clean copper at yard sales - cheap
@@sreetips ahha, while wikipedia didn't answer my questions about copper refining youtube did !, and confirms my suspicion (less reactive metals form anode sludge and more reactive metals go into solution but won't plate out until they reach a certain concentration), and there are so many such youtube videos there's little need for yet another, But your precious metals videos are still the best, keep up with the backlog !!!
So the problem with the copper would be more the impurities than the method of e.g. melting it up. Just to see what the industry goes through to get the copper 99.9% clean (and even more for electric cable), with all the electrolysis and special solutions seems to be unsuitable for a hobby. And compared with the value of the gold you process, then even 200 bucks for a bag full of copper seems to be neglible. Edit: Also: the issue with the very fine platinum salt may come from the very fast reaction with formic acid. Maybe that is the reason why you should pour the platinum salt into the acid, to give it more time to react and form larger crystals.
Hi sreeetips. I’m a big fan... I’m from a metallurgist family....can the copper/iron be melted into ingot? Might make for a cool alloy for a snare drum.. thoughts?
I too am commenting out of ignorance, but it seems that a man of your intelligence would find a use for the cemented out contaminated copper. Some Chemical Engineer help him out! Excellent vid as usual!
He only uses copper for one thing and it needs to be pure solid copper. The process of refining and turning it back into something he can use would be a lot of work. When he says it's not worth his time he's dead serious, he's got a constant supply of silver and gold scrap coming in thanks to Mrs. Sreetips so spending any time on a resource he can buy easily for cheap is counter productive.
Hi sreetip , Just a question for you ,, regarding the suspended black power , would it be possible to contain the mixture on some heat in someway and evaporate the moisture ,,,, it's perhaps even more dangerous but maybe plausible for other experiments and a curiosity . You also gave no measurements for the solution of formic acid you used along with the ammonia ect ,........... with this being your first time , do you think you got the measurement or procedure slightly ajar from stated Happy new year !
I saw a hard cover copy of Hoke's book _Refining Precious Metal Wastes_ for $400 and I bought it. I don't know why I bought it. :) BTW, you made a lot of free ammonia with that lye, Sr. Not sure if that was a good thing? I don't know.
