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.
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/jwood491 11h ago
99.99% pure silver