Hydrochloric Acid is all you need to dissolve the copper. I left a comment in your next video of this. It explains why that poor man's nitric isn't going to work.
I use something similar with silver contacts. Rather than using poor mans AR I use poor mans nitric. The small amount of silver it dissolves I cement out on copper rather than dealing with the silver chloride in rinsing. Really cool video and much appreciated that you spend the time to share
I melt all contacts together with excess copper (small scrap bits/crumbles) and cast flat anodes consisting of at least 95% copper. They are then processed by electrorefining in my copper cells. It's by far the most cost effective way of processing silver contacts. The copper is recovered as 99.9% pure. A second run through the cell will yield 99.99% pure copper. A third run will yield 99.995 to 99.999% pure copper, in case you have buyers wanting high purity. If any brass is present in the contact material the electrolyte will be contaminated with zinc, as zinc is higher up on the reactivity scale than copper. Zinc will not plate out on the cathode until the concentration is high enough, so it's important to change out the electrolyte in the cell relative often if you process any brass containing material. The zinc is recovered from the electrolyte later on. I have a couple of 205 liter (55 gallon) stainless steel drums with spent electrolyte, awaiting zinc recovery. The anode slime at the bottom of the refining cell consists of silver with contaminants, among these sometimes the nasty cadmium from older contact points. This slime is hydrometallurgical processed for silver recovery when a suitable quantity is collected.
How do you know when the electrolyte is spent?you always have great information! I do run them through my copper cell as well and 100% agree with you on being the most cost effective. I run a lot of silver plated silverware in my cell and I know that there is a lot much of metals in them. But most of the time I just pull the item out once the silver has been removed to limit the contamination to the electrolyte. How do you recover the zinc?
@@SilverStoll. Commercial refiners perform tests of their electrolyte in short intervals. Unfortunately, we amateurs don't have the luxury of a private lab with extremely expensive electronic testing equipment. In the large commercial electrorefining cells some of the electrolyte is constantly bled off and replaced with fresh electrolyte. The replacement varies depending on what the lab tests shows. Backyard refiners can only rely on their common sense, i.e. change the electrolyte often if they process material with a high contamination, and solely use the electrolyte for a longer period if they are sure that the material is relative pure. When you run an electrorefining cell some of the dissolved metal used for making the electrolyte will also plate out on the cathode during the process. Therefore, the electrolyte will be depleted over a relative short time. If using a "copper cell" to recover silver from plated materials, you'll get silver contaminated with copper. That's why you don't use copper sulfate in a "real" silver cell. Removing the silverware from the cell as soon as the silver is gone will no doubt limit contamination of the electrolyte. As copper is higher on the reactivity scale copper should plate out before silver; however, as silver is more conductive most of the silver will be plated on the cathode before any larger amount of copper.
I don't care much for silver chloride either.....too much waste solution to deal with. But, if you are going that route, I believe sulphuric will ONLY dissolve the silver and leave the copper. I've seen where this method is used to recover silver from plated flatware. I get nitric in 10 liter cases, and after the hazmat and shipping fees, it runs about $0.03/ml, but yeah, costly in lower amounts. I wish we had before and after weights. To see how much material was dissolved and how much nitric was saved. Personally, I remove the contact from its......mount, I guess I'll call it..
I have a video testing that with these contacts and it's a no go sadly. They aren't pure enough and when all the silver has been eaten it leaves a layer of base medals that keeps the rest of the silver from getting touched.
In the next couple of days I will be trying this with the formula I posted earlier on the 10k scrap gold. Building a 500ml reaction chamber. Will send pictures as I get things rolling.
I'm just finishing up a batch of soviet contacts I've had for a while and I know they are soviet because they were sent to me from a relative in Ukraine a few years ago and he had them kicking around for decades. These have been VERY odd. Significant passivation with HCl leading to stalled dissolving. No sulfuric I could try with. Had to resort to strait nitric. Even though none were magnetic there has been serious iron contamination leading to many filtering sessions followed by re-adding nitric. I'm finally at the point were silver is in solution. Cementing on copper at the moment and it cemented out VERY weird. It is fine, mirror shiny needle-like crystals (not unlike what I'd see in my electro-cell) that do not just wash off of the copper. I just decided to leave it for a while and once the silver stopped crystalizing out (at least I assume it's silver) a coarse black reside began to cement out on the silver but NOT on the copper. When I stir it the black precipitate settles much faster than the silver so I am assuming Pd and maybe Pt. I've done many batches of soviet contacts in the past and they have never been like this. Super weird stuff here.
Those silver crystals may be silver nitrate crystals vs cement silver. That sounds like you may want to pull the silver out with HCL. Let the stock pot have the rest and get your individual metals when you do your stock pot. It's sounds like a really cool experiment though! Take pictures and I will post them on my Fridays video!
@@SilverStoll Definitely not silver nitrate. been there done that. lol These were 100% metallic and not well adhered to the copper. I THINK what happened was the solution was a little too concentrated and with a high PGM level. This "pushed" the silver out quickly and it essentially plated out as if in an electro cell. Then the PGMs cemented out on top of the silver. I ran a new and unused toothbrush over it to remove it from the copper and the copper came out clean. Now there is a nice, but odd, looking layer of grey dust and silver crystals settled on the bottom of the beaker. I thought about it for a while and it turns out that I really don't care what's in it since it's going into the electro cell anyway. I added some concentrated KCl to the remaining solution to see if there was any silver left and there was virtually no clouding. if there is more than 100mg left I'd be shocked. So I followed my usual process and added more KCL to convert the rest of the nitrates to KNO3 which I'll recover and use to make more nitric acid later on. the rest goes into the stockpot and forgotten about until summer. 😁
I'm going to try and source the stuff needed to make poor man's nitric this coming summer as I do this stuff outside! maybe make a lil pew pew powder too haha CheeRs Brother
@@SilverStoll exactly haha my best friend is a long range shooter he reloads his rounds! I’ve helped him a few times it’s a lot of fun making freedom seeds 👌🏻
You had a note that most of what you thought was silver chloride you think is actually copper 1 chloride. How can you tell and did it turn out that way? And how would you process it differently vs silver chloride? Thank you!
I will have to play with it a little more, but it seems to be dissolving in the distilled water rinses. Copper 1 is very soluable in hcl so a hcl rinse will clean it up.
Yes, to much base metals will chew through the electrolyte in the silver cell. I do run them through the copper cell for a little slow way to collect the silver.
