hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and on today's video we're
going to be crushing up and smelting uh some of these generator brushes that a customer sent over
and uh these things are supposed to be about 60 to 65 silver or so by weight so we're going
to crush them up we're going to grind them up into powder i'm going to mix up some flux
and then we'll get them in our furnace melt them down and see if we can recover
some silver from these all right i got these weighed out at 250 grams worth
okay here's our stuff all crushed up um i was hoping to get a little bit finer some
of these big pieces might be a little bit of a problem but we'll see if we can burn
them up supposedly this is just a carbon matrix with silver in it as the conductor
and so there's not going to be a lot of stuff to flux off so i'm just going to mix in 50 grams of
borax and 50 grams of soda mix it around we're not going to use a collector metal this time because
there's so much silver in there it should act as pretty much its own collector metal
so we'll get this mixed up i'm going to put it in a little fireplace crucible
and we'll get this firing away and hopefully pour i don't know 150 grams of silver out of it we
start with 250 so i don't know whatever whatever two-thirds of 250 is 150 160 somewhere in there
all right so let's see what we got here there's actually uh
a bunch of carbon so that carbon from those brushes is all on top there probably dump that off
but i really want that to go away i don't see any silver beads in it or anything so it looks like
it kind of came clean but still you you don't want a bunch of carbon sitting there on top
if you can help it and maybe maybe if we got a bunch of silver in the bottom we don't care
but we'll take a look here and see we got i can still see there's carbon kind of mixed in there
i ended up adding uh an extra 400 grams of borax and soda mix so we have a total of 250 grams of
soda and 250 grams of borax in there um and i needed to add that much to get some kind of
fluid mass down below with so much carbon it just kind of sat there and really didn't do anything
and i also tried to run a really oxidizing flame to try and oxidize burn off some of that carbon
but that didn't work very well either so let me break this open and see what we
got
oh so we did get a lump of silver here's our silver block and we ended up with
78 almost 79 grams all right so now what i got is i got our our slag here and i've run it back
through the jaw crusher and the little pulverizer and got it kind of pulverized up as best i can
and i'm gonna pan it out and what what i'm gonna do here is if we lost a bunch of
silver beads in the swag if they didn't come down and collect in that button that we had
they'll be suspended in the slag and since i've crushed it and pulverized them i'm i've hopefully
liberated them and they'll pan out in the bottom of the pan just like you would for plaster gold
um so let me get this pan down and we'll see what we got all right so here's what i got in
my pan and there's obviously some bigger chunks of metal in here uh but all this dark gray stuff here
is all really heavy so i believe that's a bunch of little silver probably beads so we didn't get
very good recovery in that first one and because i didn't this stuff doesn't grind really really fine
in the pulverizer there's probably a lot of this left in the slag that just didn't get liberated
so we're gonna have to come up with a better solution than that first test
to recover all the silver all right so just like in my other gold videos
i took all the concentrates from that pan i just did and i funneled them down into a blue shop rag
i've kind of rung out the water and now i'm going to put them in this furnace and cupel
there's a dish in there i'm gonna burn off all the
all the uh shop towel stuff there melt all that silver i'm gonna add a little bit of
lead to it just to get the process started and then the letter locks dies away and leave the
our silver from our panning cons and we can kind of figure out how much silver we lost and
judge judge kind of our recovery from that
all right guys so here's our uh little bit of silver i recovered from those uh
panning concentrates we did when we pan the slag uh whoop and let's get a weight on this
so it's about seven and three quarters grams so we ended up with about 10 percent more
uh by paying that slag and just kind of shooting from the hip here i figured we may have recovered
a third to a half of the silver that was in the the slag so let's say it's 15 grams
so all together there may be close to 90 grams or so of silver in 250 grams worth of those brushes
well i wasn't very happy with our previous results and so i'm going to try something different i'm
going to take some of this portland cement here and in my furnace i'm going to make just a little
dished kind of i guess it's a crucible or a cupel uh i'm just gonna make a little pile of portland
cement in there and make a little depression in it and i'm gonna break up some of those brushes
and set them around in there and try and oxidize them uh just in place and i can add uh
some potassium nitrate to them as an oxidizer i can't use a whole lot of flux because the
portland cement will get eat up by the flux but that's my next trial is i'm just going to
try and oxidize them without any flux and see if i can leach the silver out of them that way
all right there's a little uh dish i made it's kind of hokey but
for our experiment we'll see if it works so now let me crush up some more of those brushes like
i did earlier in that little jaw crusher and we'll put them in there and get this
cooking
all right guys well i i just grabbed this little uh pillar here of silver
and uh pulled on i was just gonna try and pull the the metal part out but i got the whole
letharge encrusted chunk of portland cement and you can see all these little silver beads
i'm gonna crush these up and get those panned out and then the the huge puddle of silver so
uh i think i think it it did pretty good a couple things this was really just an experiment i would
not suggest doing this with lead on a large scale uh and i'm actually i have some some
stuff coming that i'm going to like to try it's going to be bismuth and you can instead of doing
the lead you can use bismuth in exactly the same way with exactly the same materials and business
isn't nearly as as toxic as wet is so the bismuth is going to be an interesting way to to do this
and also i i didn't quite oxidize there's just a little bit right there that i pulled off that
glob in the middle i didn't quite get all those brushes oxidized there's just that little tiny
piece left there um but i'm gonna let's pull this big chunk out see how much it weighs and then
we'll try and clean up the rest of these little beads out here and i may even put them back
in in my electric furnace and get them cheap held in a real cupel and get it all uh all formed
into one nice silver button um but uh one last thing this all this stuff came out of 140 grams
with those brushes here's a few of those little silver beads that i panned out it i didn't crush
them up fine enough so i didn't get all of them out but there's the bigger ones so i'll take these
i'll combine them over here with this big chunk i got in here that's just borax uh and then i'll
just melt all this down i'll clean that silver up we'll pour in our cone mold and then we can
get a good weight on it and figure out a good percentage uh weight silver those brushes were
so
all right guys let's check out what we got here
it's probably still really hot but
there's our there's our silver we'll just get it knocked off of there there we go
get her cleaned up a little bit here but it separates from the slag real nice and
easy
all right well here's our little block of silver
ends up weighing 91 grams out of 140 grams of brushes so
yeah that's that's right about two-thirds i think 60 60 65 somewhere in there
so we actually got really pretty good recovery using that lead method all right guys so our
experiment turned out pretty well we got our 65 or so percent recovery which is what we were hoping
for uh so it shows there's a lot of silver in those brushes again i really don't like using
the lid as a collector uh it's just really toxic and and even though not much gets off
into the atmosphere it's pretty nasty stuff so i'm really excited about trying this business stuff
i should have uh bismuth here in a couple days and i'm excited to make some some new videos
using bismuth uh as a collector metal and then also oxidizing it away in the cupel so look for
those coming up but uh if i was gonna do this on a larger scale i would get more of a roasting
dish type of thing instead of a cupel and that way the any oxides that form wouldn't actually
get absorbed by the the container it would float on top and it would have to interact with the
carbon so you could envision like a large dinner plate type of thing with a very thin layer of
bismuth on it that you could sprinkle this carbon dust or these little small carbon chunks onto
and as the bismuth oxidized it would interact with the carbon go back to bismuth metal and the whole
process would recycle until these brushes were were all used up and then you could add more and
continually enrich that puddle of bismuth with silver and you could do that essentially all
day long and at the end of the day you could pour off the bismuth silver alloy and uh keep hell it
in a final cupel and recover all your silver you could recycle all that bismuth by taking the kepel
and crushing it up smelting it down with some carbon reducing all the business back to
metal and then reusing it the next day or the next time you did it so um that would be my longer term
goal if i was going to do this on a large scale but again i think we proved the point that you
need to oxidize away the entire brush and uh one of the best ways to do that i found was
by oxidizing uh these these metals and having it interact with the carbon if you guys have any
thoughts or ideas on a better way to do this please let me know by email or
you can leave a comment in the comment section below and you can find our contact information
in the description below so thanks for watching and we'll see on the next video