04/07/2026
Hey guys! Here's a little peek behind the scenes, at what it takes to keep this refinery going.
So in case you didn't know, I use a Silver cell. This means I use an electrolyte solution to strip pure silver from sterling silver. Leaving behind a blue/greenish colored liquid solution. The blue/green color is from copper. Copper nitrate is blue. It can be various shades of blue or green, technically. But the brighter more blue it is the more pure and less impurities in it.
Sterling silver is by nature 7 1/2% copper
Hence the reason .925 Sterling Silver has that number designation. (92.5%+7.5%=100%)
I have actually doing so much Sterling lately, and I'm starting to accumulate copper by the pound.
I've been selling the bars of copper on eBay for 15 bucks a pound. Not gonna get rich off that, but it's definitely better kept than thrown away!
Just had my intake with VR&E. They're gonna get me started on the self-employment track with Voc rehab. It'd be nice if they got me set up, in a way to where I can scale this by a factor of 10.
Currently I can pull about 200 g of silver out of my bowls a day, or about 10 to 12 g/ hour it'd be nice if I get up that to about 2 kg a day.
They're gonna help me get set up with the correct PPE, they're gonna get me a safe place to work, ie: building a shed on the other concrete slab that I poured, before finally paying for me to go to whatever courses they deemed necessary for me to be a certified licensed refinery.
Or "precious metal recovery center"
There's big money in this too! I routinely buy ounces of sterling silver at yard sales for like five bucks.. as a matter of fact two weekends ago I picked up 2 ounces for 10 bucks. Cleaned Sterling silver with no stones in it I was pretty stoked about that. That should've been about 120 to 150 bucks minimum..
And then take it dissolve it in nitric acid, until it is pure liquid. I filter it using my Büchner funnel, before returning the solution to a number five plastic jug or Pyrex bowls. And then drop a bar of copper in it, and the silver nitrate immediately begins plating itself to the copper bar. Basically what happens is the silver that is in silver nitrate exchanges from the solution onto the copper bar and becomes solid once again. A very small amount of the copper bar gets dissolved in the process but it doesn't really matter because that copper stays liquid in the solution, and once the Silver stops plating itself to the bar which takes about 10 to 24 hours.. you're left with what is called Silver cement.
Which is just a high purity silver powder, if you did everything correctly at this point you should have around 99% pure silver powder once dried.
And Once dried, I weigh it. Catalog the difference between the starting rate and the silver cement powder. I like to keep track of my numbers as this tells me my efficiency.
I take that silver powder after it's dried and I melt it in my furnace, and then pour the liquid Silver into ice cold water. Creating silver shot, which looks like little silver BBs.
Some could stop here and be satisfied with 99.9% pure silver.
However if you want that one more nine pure
From .999 to .9999(which doesn't sound like much but it is in the refinery world) you're gonna have to run that Silver shot through a Silver cell.
Running a Silver cell, is a lot simpler than it sounds.
Basically you just need a bench power supply, access to nitric acid, access to nearly unlimited amounts of silver, and proper PPE & lab glassware.
To run your Silver cell you're gonna want to have a stainless steel bowl, you're gonna want to fill that bowl with a 10% silver nitrate solution.
For example if you have a 1000 L stainless steel ball you'd want to put between 75g and 100g of silver in that solution maximum.
The Silver that is in the solution creates conductivity, as many of you probably know Silver is one of the most conductive materials on the planet. When you add electricity to silver nitrate the water basically becomes a wire.
So you put your impure silver directly in the center of your bowl that is not touching anything and suspended by a plastic lid, that is called your anode.
Basically in the refining world do you have yourAnode and your cathode.
Your Anode bag, which is just a 45 micron silk screen is what holds the impure silver shot.
You then hook up the positive electrode to the Silver that is in the anode basket. You then hook up the negative electrode to the stainless steel bowl. So the only thing that is in between the cathode and the anode is liquid silver nitrate.
Once you turn the power on the positive electricity strips the silver ions away from the Silver shot and allows it to pass through the anode bag before plating itself onto the wall of the stainless steel bowl.
The silver nitrate solution which also contains silver, acts as the bridge. Transporting pure silver from the center anode bag, and it allows it to plate to the side of the bowl, resulting in a 99.99% pure product.
This takes the shape of crystals which can be manipulated, you can make smaller crystals with lower amps or thinner more wispy type crystals by cranking the amps. Basically the higher the voltage and the higher the amps the faster stuff's gonna grow but there's a catch because if it grows too fast it looks too thin and wispy it doesn't really have a attractive physical appearance. It'll still be pure but it's gonna take up more space.. and in a world where we're all about efficiency space taken up equals less efficiency.
Plus when you're trying to sell Silver crystals nobody wants to buy a gigantic container full of a bunch of thin wispy crystals, they want dense packed crystals that don't take out very much room and fill up a test tube for example, with very little space left out.
Silver refineries are all backed up right now for a while it was the opposite but now the natural order of things has taken back over.
I love doing this! Precious metals are only gonna go up in price, it might not go up tomorrow it might not go up next week but if you would've bought $1000 worth of silver exactly one year ago. You'd have about $3000 worth today. Just by holding onto it for one year.
So while world energy prices are skyrocketing silver and gold prices are dropping.
Collect as much silver and gold as you can now before things flip-flop again. You'll thank me later.
Love you guys!
