I remember seeing all those sweets in the Indian spice shop and thinking, man who would eat that tinfoil or whatever it is. I never knew it was delicious .999 pure silver.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varak
I had a indian friend whose mother ate gold foil as it was meant to be good for the digestion. Anyone have any precious metal recovery ideas for this sort of thing?
Interesting, the article says silver has no particular flavour. I disagree somewhat as it tastes quite metallic & bitter. (Electrical effect, weak acid in saliva) I doubt that there is much effect on the body though there are no salts or acids inside a person that can effectively break down pure silver. Hydrochloric acid in the stomach wont touch it so I guess it just becomes expensive poo.
Misconception. Gold is one of the most inert metals out there, hence it's choice as an investment/wealth storage metal. Silver has benefits because of it's anti-bacterial properties. But Gold? Just for looks. You know what's good for digestion? Ginger. It's a shitload cheaper than gold as well.
Second Ginger for digestion. Apparently, silver antimicrobial properties is enhanced if gold is present. According to this paper anyway http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=877.php
You can get gold and silver foil for 'guilding' on eBay. I did, see below for cuban cigar guilded in silver foil - not yet smoked !? http://forums.silverstackers.com/to...ink-it-and-now-you-can-also-smoke-silver.html with gold foil, i guilded 3 black & white postcards from my city of birth and enframed it and its gracing my wall.
Yeap correct to a point. It's a catalyst metal for numerous biological substances. Much like the stainless steel soap bars you see that chefs use for removing the smell of onions & garlic on their hands.
That would make my home baked refining process a whole lot cheaper, show me how? I agree, It does remove a certain amount of sulphates but dissolve silver? Both silver and copper are very non-reactive metals. Neither will dissolve in hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid. Instead, the "oxidizing agent", nitric acid (HNO3), is required. In acidic solutions, the nitrate ion (NO3-) is an excellent oxidizer and it will oxidize Ag (s) to Ag+ (aq) and Cu(s) to Cu2+ (aq). The reduction product is a colorless gas, nitrogen monoxide (NO), which immediately reacts with oxygen in the air to produce the orange-brown gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
Sorry dynoman, you're right. I remember disolving some silver metal in a chem prac once and I thought it was HCl, but clearly I now need to do some careful revision of the reactivity tables!
Cool Turk, I've been playing around recently recycling some junk Silver. I discovered you can actually slowly dissolve Silver with a mixture of HCL & a nitrate salt like KNO3 & lot's of external heat. It works even better with H2SO4 (Sulphuric) & nitrate as when the silver dissolves with HCL it immediately precipitates to form silver chloride which is harder to process than elemental silver dropped from an acid solution when you are using the preferred acid which is Nitric. Eventually I hope to perfect the process & post some vids here. Home bake silver recycling is heaps of fun. There aren't any really good vids on youtube describing the technique you can use to do this. Getting hold of the nitric acid was expensive & I did waste some but I've got is sussed now.
Hi Dynoman, My problem lies is deciding what to do with scrap circuitry and so on. I seems a hassle to pull out the boards from old electronic devices - so much easier to toss them out - yet then I feel like I'm wasting silver and I need to go to WDAVIS and seek absolution or something! I hope your experiments pay off. I hate tossing out good silver!
