Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today we're gonna
be doing a little experiment here with some of the silverware. And this stuff
has a sterling silver handle on it and then the utensil part is actually
stainless. And so you can see from you know some of these handles that have
been knocked off, this is the silver part, and we're gonna knock all the handles
off the silverware and try and melt them down in our furnace and get a sterling
silver block out of it. Alright so I'm gonna try to knock the sterling silver
part of this knife off, starts right here. I'm just gonna take it on my table here
hit it with the hammer and the sterling silver split up there pretty easy. And it's full
of a bunch of putty junk, so I'll have to mix a little bit of
flux in there, but you can see there's the there's the silver part here and
here's the stainless steel part of the knife that we can just take to the
scrapyard. We're really interested in this for the value.
Alright so here's the silver handles from our silverware and here's all the
stainless steel junk that we don't want. Okay here's our crucible, I ended up
bashing up the handles a little bit so they'd all fit in there and we got 12
handles total. So I'm going to take my crucible put them in our kaolwool
furnace, here this is just a couple wraps the kaolwool on top with some fire
brick. So I'll take the crucible here, put it right in there, there's a lid behind
it and we'll put a propane burner right through there
and we'll get it up to temperature, get it on molten. I'm gonna put probably
about a hundred to 150 grams of borax in there just to help absorb any oxides and
whatever that putty stuff was if there's any of that left over I'll try and get
that all into the slag so we end up with a real nice silver button at the bottom.
So here's our little furnace setup, there's the propane bottle there,
regulator that feeds this little burner, just a single burner on this one.
There's looking down the top a little vent hole, you can see silverware in
there the borax. And really that's it that's all there is to it, it's sitting
on some fire brick, very cheap to make, very easy, works very well.
Okay it's been about nine or ten minutes now and the silver is almost completely
submerged under the borax there. The borax is starting to melt it's formed a
little puddle on top. So we're like gonna let this heat up and get ready to pour
here probably another five or ten minutes. So the whole process is going to
only take about 15 minutes to melt this stuff down, it's really going pretty fast.
Here's the cone mold we're using, it's something I built just out of steel, it just
comes down to a point. All the dense material will go to the
bottom into the point there and then all the slag will float on top and you'll
have a good separation between the metal and the slag.
Okay so here's our slag stuff on top from our silver pour, we're going to knock
it over into this bin. And right there is our silver button. It's still pretty hot, but
nice flat top, a little bit of slag I had a chip off there but no big deal. Here's
the, there's the slag nice and glassy. Alright there's our scale, zeroed out and
grams. There's our sterling silver piece that
we got from our pour and Wow! 300 grams! 300 grams of sterling silver
so out of 12 handles that's 25 grams a handle. That's pretty cool, there's a lot
of silver in those things! So hope you guys enjoyed the video, it was a fun one.
How to get silver out of silverware! So thanks for watching and we'll see you on
the next one.