Deplating silver-plated flatware

[chaseonbase]

I think what your doing is awesome. Ive been trying to find good sources for sterling at prices around spot, but most sources are just exhausting with prices way over spot. Now silverplate on the other hand I can get hand over fist.(at a great price) Im a newb to this hobby, but would love to learn more. Some of the jargen is difficult for me to understand, but im sure it just takes time. I can definitely help you with getting silverplate.

Check what's under your silverplate. If it is pure copper, then it is perfect for a CuSO4 cell. If it is Ni-Zn-Cu alloy or pure Zn, it is work and cost intensive. Then you shouldn't buy over 25% of spot and you should only use heavily plated material like 90-150g Ag/2400cm2. Knives, spoons and forks are almost never copper.

The common attitude on the forum is, that silver plate mostly is no profit.

Thanks for the heads up solar. Most of the items from my local flea market are silverware. With tons of platters. I know I can get about 7lbs of silverware around 5 dollars. I know theres a bunch of pots and other stuff as well. Next time im in there, ill snap some pics.

 

[skippy]

I think what your doing is awesome. Ive been trying to find good sources for sterling at prices around spot, but most sources are just exhausting with prices way over spot. Now silverplate on the other hand I can get hand over fist.(at a great price) Im a newb to this hobby, but would love to learn more. Some of the jargen is difficult for me to understand, but im sure it just takes time. I can definitely help you with getting silverplate.

Check what's under your silverplate. If it is pure copper, then it is perfect for a CuSO4 cell. If it is Ni-Zn-Cu alloy or pure Zn, it is work and cost intensive. Then you shouldn't buy over 25% of spot and you should only use heavily plated material like 90-150g Ag/2400cm2. Knives, spoons and forks are almost never copper.

The common attitude on the forum is, that silver plate mostly is no profit.

Thanks for the props, I had some plans to get regular supply of silver plate stuff through various second hand dealers and what not, but the drop in silver has taken a lot of shine off of it. After stripping a lot of silver plate, I found it's pretty variable. Some has 3% silver, some hardly anything. The average is about 1% and a bit though. I'm going to keep buying it when I can get it at the base metal price or less.

 

[solar_plasma]

Geology in the windowsill

I just observed something quite interesting: I had a sample, about the 100g, of silver contaminated with cobber from the cell bottom. I had dissolved most of the copper by soaking it some days in AP (=CuCl2 which I had freshed up with HCl/H2O2). The silver became a very fine violett-brown powder, we talked about it before, obviosly silver chloride had formed and was darken from the daylight outside.

I did not wash it very thoroughly, just decanted 3 times and put it into a storage vessel. Now some water could vaporize, new water went upwards through the small capillary, took some CuCl2 with it, which ofcourse forms a crust on the surface.

Now, there form some silver light grey spots, typically for more pure silver. :shock:

Correct me, if I am wrong: Some copper was left between the silver/silver chloride particles and cementated the light grey silver out of the silver chloride and formed new copper chlorides, which again went up to the crust with the raising water.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

It's best not to let your silver chloride dry out. It will crystalize and complicate the conversion back to metallic silver.

Dave

 

[solar_plasma]

It's best not to let your silver chloride dry out. It will crystalize and complicate the conversion back to metallic silver.

Yes, if you want to process it by NaOH/syrup or cementation. If processed hot, it has to dry sooner or later. Since I have a lot of different recovered samples, I want to improve my skills at all of those processes. And if I wouldn't have let it dry, I would't have got this interesting, though useless, effect.