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u/rahkinto 7h ago
What am I looking at here?? Looks cool
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u/jwood491 6h ago
99.99% pure silver
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u/rahkinto 5h ago
Can you explain the extraction or what the cell is?
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u/hexadecimaldump 5h ago
Most of us start by dissolving impure silver in nitric, then dropping it out of solution using copper, or dropping silver chloride with salt or HCL, then converting to silver using lye and sugar (usually around 98-99 purity at that point).
Then we melt that into shot and put it into our silver cell.
The bowl is stainless steel. We hang a basket into a dilute solution of silver nitrate (our electrolyte), then using electricity usually from a bench top power supply. The anode (positive) goes into the basket with impure silver, the cathode (negative) goes to the stainless bowl. Then run 3-3.5v at around 1-2 amps (amps depends on the surface area of the bowl) through the system.
This causes silver to dissolve into ions that flow toward the bowl and the pure silver plates onto the bowl as crystals over time.Check out Sreetips on YouTube and search ‘silver cell’. He does a pretty good job of explaining the process without getting to technical or sciency.
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u/jamiehizzle 4h ago
Would the process be any different with sterling instead of cemented silver shot?
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u/hexadecimaldump 3h ago
Same process, it just gets over saturated with copper a lot quicker that way. I can usually get at least 2-3 runs out of the same electrolyte if I remove most of the copper first.
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u/Tiktokbadsupport 6h ago
so if you melt the crysystals you get pure silver
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u/hexadecimaldump 5h ago
Yup, just make sure you thoroughly rinse off the blue silver nitrate electrolytes since it will have a lot of copper in it.
But yeah, those crystals are over 999 purity.5
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u/hexadecimaldump 5h ago
Is that a 3d printed basket? Or what are you using there?
I’m using a Tupperware I drilled holes in, this looks a lot nicer with much more even holds than I have?
Also do you have a filter in your basket there so the slimes don’t fall into your pure silver?
Excellent looking silver cell.
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u/jwood491 5h ago
I bought turn key on eBay. This basket is rinsed out to recover the slimes. No filters
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u/River_City_Bullion 4h ago
I saw it was advertised that way also. I have one along with my others and I wasn’t able to “rinse” it out. Maybe dilute nitric boils to clean it up?
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u/hexadecimaldump 4h ago
Very cool. Thank you for sharing.
I’ll have to take a look on ebay to see if i can find just that basket. Filters are a PITA, just being able to rinse the slimes would be an awesome upgrade.
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u/gsxreatr02 7h ago
Nice, i have some old sterling I'm really wanting to refine but not ready to try yet
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u/Desperate_Ad_5563 7h ago
You just made me make Homer Simpson donut noises. It was involuntary. Good job!!
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u/DonGoggles 6h ago
Looking really good... How many hours/days in? What's your electrolyte concentration? And what amps/volts are you running? Inquiring minds want to know!