Silver Plate Stripping Sulfuric & Nitric Acid Method 

Try and be sure you salt water solution is saturated. As far as why you did not get a drop, I really have no idea as I have never had that happen with silver chloride. Even a tiny amount of silver should have produced something?? Very odd, the only other thing I can think of is, it wasn't silver plating, but I would think that was highly unlikely. If you figure out the problem, please let me know!!

@@BackyardScrapping Thanks for getting back to me. I read somewhere that the mix was 17 gram salt to 290 ml water. This was obviously wrong. When I saturated the solution with salt it turned into silver chloride.

@@hanneslourens2371 Great, glad that worked!!! 😀

Pretty sure they are brass inside, and they were all marked plated. Also even if there is or was a tiny bit more silver in the alloy, I would be going backwards money wise. Brass and copper need about 3 to 3.5 ml's of nitric per gram to dissolve, they would need to be at least 50% silver to make the complete dissolve worth it to do. Nitric acid is just to expensive.

@@BackyardScrapping I've seen a ton of people do the same thing ,throw them out, it's silver alloy to the center! I process silverware a lot, mine looked like yours, but if you disolve the left overs, you will get more silver....or just throw away money. Dishes are usually plated onto brass. It wares away! So silver is alloy to the center, or the plate would wear off in less than a year!

@@christopherevridge455 I will give it a try when I do my next batch.

Thanks so much for the tip, I will try this next time I do it!!

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of sulfuric, but in some cases I have to break down and use it.

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just about anything sugar based will work.

Yep Drain Opener, you sure did! Many high powered Drain Openers are mostly Sulfuric Acid, or Caustic Soda, ( Sodium Hydroxide ) DO NOT mix a caustic soda base drain opener with nitric acid!!!! NOT GOOD!!! You will end up with a violent reaction which creates Sodium Nitrate, and if its to contained, you my even get a little "Boom" out of it. The one I used was 93% sulfuric acid, you can look on line to see the most concentrated brands, I don't recommend going to much below 93% however because you don't know exactly what the other ingredients are or how they will react with the Nitrc Acid. always do a small test first to make sure that they will mix without a mishap!!

Backyard Scrapping Thank you for all that info!!! Thank you, MY PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, or should I say Chemistree, haha!

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Thanks will have to give that a try. At the time I made the video the only info I could find was the mix I used. Just got some more plated stuff, so I will try 19/1 on the next batch. Thanks again for the info!! 👍

Filtered everything and treated it all just to be safe, more then likely it was. Thanks for watching!

Thanks for the info, this was an experiment, I had seen it done and wanted to give it a try.

Thanks for your concern, I'm outside in open air using back fans that direct fumes away from me, have on plastic lenses all the time.

There is NO HCL in this mix, it is 75% sulfuric acid and 25% nitric acid, and yes the other jars were rinse water.

About $5

I have done that before, again I'm not really a fan of that method because the AR dissolves everything and ends up being a bigger clean up in the end. I saw this method done, and just thought it would be a good way to avoid dissolving all the metal and having to deal with it later.

@@BackyardScrapping I use electrolysis to strip silver plating. It is very cheap, but takes forever. One way I've tried before and works is to use dilute nitric. The silver dissolves then trades with the base metal. It isn't as cheap, but if you boil the dilute nitric it is very fast.

​@@Zeke-id2bo Any way you go, silver plate can be a real pain, but as scrappers we will keep fiddling around, and someone, somewhere will hone stripping it to perfection. As far as being a pain, it is also still pretty available, I have several big bags full, cups, pots, trays etc., the only down fall is time and or cost verses yield. But it is still one of the easiest to get PM scrap materials out there. There was a thrift store here that I would frequent, I saw the same silver plated stuff there for sometimes a couple years, only to see more pile up on it. One day I joking said to the person working the counter that I would buy it all for a dollar a pound. She said she would tell her boss, hence my big bags of silver plate. Its for sure worth that silver wise, but it falls back to what I said above, time and cost to remove it. If you here of a sure fire way to do that, by all means let me know. That sulfuric nitric method I tested in the video is the best I have found, EXCEPT when it comes to larger items, you either have to make a huge bath of it, and not worry about recovering it until it saturates, which could take a LOOOOONG time, or cut it up, which throws you right back into the time thing. Oh well, we get what we can, and do what we can with it, right... 😁😁

@@BackyardScrapping lol, very true! That's why I prefer to stick to karat gold and sterling. The best method I have found is using sodium sulfite in distilled water and running it with a stainless steel cathode. It strips it fast and is ok on the yield. But I've found nothing faster than boiling dilute nitric acid. It just costs too much. I thought about making nitric acid with my short path distiller. Potasium nitrate and sulfuric acid. You can produce a lot of fuming nitric acid like that for pretty cheap. Duda energy has a great deal on bulk sulfuric acid. The by product is potasium sulfate which I could use to dissolve rhodium. I just don't know how to precipitate only rhodium out of solution....

​@@Zeke-id2bo LOL I have a distilling set up as well, and have thought the same, lol again with the exception that fuming nitric scares me as much as the stuff I would be making it from ( sulfuric ) There are pretty much 3 acids on my I don't care for list number 1 is hydrofluoric, number 2 sulfuric, and number 3 fuming nitric. Back in the day when I had my rock gem & jewelry shop I used hydrofluoric to remove rubies form quartz rock. I used it until read about a guy ( I think it was in India ) screwing up and it dissolved the bones in his fingers before he could get to a hospital. That was the last time for that stuff, all though it was a great way to get rubies out of solid rock without damaging them! I pretty much just stick with HCL and nitric, and a little phosphoric that I use for coin recovery from time to time. Thought about trying that stuff as stripping agent, as it loves eating copper, but again, not cost effective being I have only been able to find it at double to triple the cost of HCL. I have enjoyed the chat!! Again, if you come across a silver method other the electro & the sulfuric nitric, let me know and I will do the same!!

It is a combination of silver and what ever the base metal is that it was plated on, so it could be copper brass etc.. The cupel will remove the lead, don't think it works for other metals. I would say if you want to end up with pure silver its going to have to be refined.

There will be silver,palladium,copper and possibly a tiny amount of platinum. Dissolve the slimes in HCl, then filter off the silver, and platinum solids. The solution will have palladium ,use dimethylglyoxime to drop out the palladium. Filter palladium and melt into palladium bar. Solution will only have copper and base metals left. The silver and possibly platinum dissolve in nitric and sulfuric acid. Any solids left will only be platinum and gold jewelry was involved. Convert silver in nitrate by either using copper bars or add salt to convert to silver chloride. The platinum can be melted into a bead or refined further in aqua regia. The silver chloride converted with 100% lye drain opener, then sugar, rinse till clean, then melted into .999 silver bullion bar.

Mixing the sulfuric and nitric acids allows the silver to be dissolved without dissolving the base metals, IE Copper, Brass, etc..

The nitric would dissolve everything, the silver and everything under it IE., brass copper etc.. This mix dissolves the silver without attacking the metal under it. Yes I could just dip it directly in the nitric and dissolve the silver but I would also dissolve some of the base metal as well which it what I was trying to avoid. This was just a test and not necessarily something I would use to make a profit. Thanks for your comment and the clarification on the piranha solution, I was unsure about exactly what it was.

Yes, we all keep on trying, therefore I love your videos here and can learn from you. So the sulf.acid is building up a passivation layer on the next metall under the silver I guess. Hmmm, 3 to 1 , the sulf. acid is not used up? Give some nitric and it can be used over and over again?

@@ollim619 I recently tried sulphuric to nictric 19:1. Was suprised this did in fact did not touch the copper underneath. (both concentrated, 60Сelc)

nothing wrong with that method, its just long and kind of messy, but there is basically, no cost and no danger to re-verse plating, and anyone can do it at home with no special equipment. Its actually a great way to get into silver recovery. A battery charger, a couple of jars, a piece stainless steel and you're in business!

I done it many ways, mainly trying to find the best and most cost effective way for larger items. Flatware pretty much goes easy no matter the method, its the "Big Stuff" thats hard to do. Thanks for watching!!

Thanks, I know that now, but I didn't know at the time I made this video. Probably won't ever make it though, not a big fan of using sulfuric acid, only use it when I pretty much have no other choice. Thanks for watching!!

@@BackyardScrapping No problem! Have you ever considered doing an extraction of chromium from stainless steel by turning it into a soluble chromate or dichromate?

@@chemicalmaster3267 As far as my refining skills go, I pretty much stick to gold silver and copper. I am learning about PGM's but still leery of them. I have had no formal schooling with this, pretty much all the basics were taught to me by an old goldsmith who did his own refining. I think Chromium from stainless would be way above my pay grade, wouldn't mind watching the process though, sounds interesting.

@@BackyardScrapping Maybe it´s not that expensive. It only requires hydrochloric acid (or other mineral acid of your choice), hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate and sodium hydroxide (potassium hydroxide and ammonia also work). If you are interested I can tell you the entire process.

@@chemicalmaster3267 That would be cool, if you would you can drop me an email. My email address is in the description area. Thanks.

Great question, LOL that was the one thing I didn't do was a total starting weight, I was just kinda comparing it to what I get what I do the salt water electro stripping. As you said above, it is very hard to base a yield on a starting weight simply because of all the variables that come into play. I have found that what ever method I use, be it sanding, the method in this video, or salt water electro, I generally get about 2 grams of recovered silver per 5 pieces of mixed flatware. Remember that is recovered, not refined, no matter what anyone says, even though you may be removing .999 silver from the items you are stripping, you are also removing a bit of base metal. Thanks for your question!

@@BackyardScrapping 👍

Tap water, but I have a well so there is no chlorine in my water. ok thanks

I didn't start with a weight. When you're stripping used silver plate a starting weight really doesn't matter because each and every piece is different depending on how worn they are. You might have 2 identical spoons for example, if one of them was used heavily, and the other not at all you are going to end up with 2 different yields from 2 items that are the same. There is no point it trying to figure an average yield from silver plate, as your yield is going to differ with each batch of material. Also the amount of plating also differs from company to company. Its just hit and miss, you never know what you're gonna get.

It has been a very long time since I made this video, I believe I used 4 to 1

@@BackyardScrapping thanks for the reply

Best way is to get some silver test solution, you can get it pretty inexpensive on ebay.

Hayesville North Carolina not to far from you, i think just a few hours

Backyard Scrapping it would be awesome to come over your way this spring and do a video together. Just a thought. Looking forward to your next video.

sounds good to me, would like to do that!

Probably not, but I also did not totally use up the acid. I could have more the likely stripped alot more material. This video was more or less to see how it would work.

Thanks!!

replied if I have the time

probably, some have said gold, palladium, etc., but I really don't think it was because everything redissolved.

Don't know how to do that, sorry can't make a video about it.

@@BackyardScrapping sir why

@@farukhagwan8577 cause I don't know

@@BackyardScrapping OK sir

You don't need sulfuric to dissolve solid silver. This method is used for plated material, adding sulfuric to the nitric make a protective layer over the base metal so the nitric will only dissolve the plating and only a very small bit of the base metal.

I was think if I can use sulfuric is more economic and accessible

@@ddsdsa2939 Sad to say, the only thing that dissolves silver is nitric. I have never done it, but from what I understand HCL + sodium nitrate, or potassium nitrate makes pour mans AR, I think this will dissolve silver as silver chloride. Don't quote me on this, as I said I have never done it, do a little research on it and see if that will work for you.

HCl is not good in combination will not dissolve the silver and sulfuric +nitrate salt is not good. and I hate to distill to get the nitric acid is not to hard but I not work in my house , Actually is very cheap nitric acid 6 euro is 5 kg of nitrate salt and 17 euro 5 litre sulfuric acid and after distillation you will get 5 litre of very pure nitric acid this mean with 22 you get min 8 litre of 60%nitric acid. But I don't work in my house and in my country possession of nitric acid and aqua regia is punish with jail from 1 year to 5 year and intention to enter in possession with 6 months to 5 years of jail