Last year, I went on an expedition out west to Utah to collect a variety of raw materials for future projects.
This included soda ash, gold, gypsum, salt, bentonite, ochre and even, some obsidian
One of the biggest goals from this trip was to collect one element that will be crucial for an upcoming project
I was challenged to last year by author Lewis Dartnell
Lewis: Next Andy, your next challenge to level up on the series... Create a primitive camera from scratch.
Andy: There are a few different silver compounds that are photoreactive which is a crucial reaction needed for capturing an image onto film.
Before I can make them, I'll need some silver.
It takes millions of specialized and skilled experts around the world to produce the countless items we use every day.
But could an average person do everything to make all of these items alone? Well, that's what I try to attempt.
My name is Andy, and this is How to Make Everything.
I was already in contact with Cody of Cody's lab to get his assistance in making glass and
was hoping I might be able to get access to his family's mines from which he's mined and processed his own silver before
But for some reason his family isn't too open to letting some random person from the internet go into their mine.
Getting access to an active mine is pretty difficult and I had little luck with anyone I've reached out to.
So in my continued journey, I found myself in the southern tip of Utah at an old silver mining ghost town - Silver Reef
Utah is scattered with ghost towns all round from various mining operations that eventually dried up.
Silver Reef is one of these towns, with its own unique history and unique silver ore. I met with Eric
of the Silver Reef Museum to learn more about this town and hopefully
get some silver ore. Eric: So this is Silver Reef, and they found silver and sandstone here
It's one of the only places in the world that it was found in sandstone
So it took over nine years for anybody to believe the man who first found it and he found a piece of float
Which is ore that's detached from the main source. In this case, it went about four miles down a creek
So he took his sample to an assayer and he refused to test it, because silver and sandstone
doesn't occur. Anybody that knew anything about mining knew that doesn't happen. So no one would test it for over nine years
No one would even believe him or take him serious
until somebody else came here and eventually found it and promoted it and then we had a boomtown. And this would have been about 1875.
Over a thousand merchants and miners came from Pioche, Nevada, and built downtown Silver Reef
which had a Main Street of over a mile long. More than a hundred businesses were put up in three months.
Butchers, bakers, barbers, dentists, lawyers,
there was a brass band, horse racing track, you could get dancing lessons, singing lessons,
There was a theatre group here, hat makers, shoe makers, restaurants, saloons, hotels, its Undertaker, casket maker
You get my picture. Anything you wanted
was here, even a photographer. Andy: Many of the settlers in this region at this time were Mormons, but mining boom towns,
like Silver Reef, often brought in a contrasting assortment of people. Eric: Mormon pioneers,
they didn't want to spend a lot of time on pie-in-the-sky stuff
that's gonna go away. The Mormons had food and the miners had money
so, it worked out for both sides in that. And if you can imagine in a
desert like this where you're just scratching out everything you can to survive and then here's this
metropolis in a sense that was built in three
months, and they had items from all over the world.
Andy: The mines of silver reef were mined starting in 1875
But most mining stopped just nine years later. Eric: Silver Reef
the mines still have silver in them. Ore is still there - copper
It just got to be harder as they went deeper and it was more about
Economics than the lack of ore. Andy: Starting in 1785, the U.S.
used the silver standard which pegged the value of the currency to a fixed ratio of silver
however
the discovery of many new silver deposits in the following decades
Caused a silver price to be relatively unstable and many countries - including the U.S
eventually switched over to the gold standard. The market kind of collapsed when they went away from the silver standard?
Eric: Yeah
The gold standard was adopted by all the countries and
prices went from a $1.22 an ounce to
65 cents an ounce. Andy: Mining has resumed off and on in the area, which is still rich with silver
But at its current value, it's not worth the cost to extract it. Eric: Down on the rivers
You'll see sand with the black specks in it. That could be silver
But it would probably take about three dump truck loads full of
Sand to get enough gas to pay for one of the trucks to get down there
So it's just not worth it. Andy: Most recently, in the 1950s, my name briefly occurred here for a different element - Uranium.
Like gold and copper, silver can occasionally be found as a native metal
but it's very rare. Most ore is a silver compound - usually silver sulfide. It takes a bit of a process to extract.
Eric: Silver is coming out of other minerals. They're a byproduct.
Usually, silver actually is an off-product to copper, when they
separate it. Then they would put it in the settling tanks, add this different chemistry to it, mercury being one of them,
cyanide which helps separates it from other metals, like copper
They would heat that up, vaporize most of the chemistry out, and then eventually they would use the mercury that doesn't amalgam
to draw the silver to it like a magnet, and then heat the amalgam up, and then what they would have left would be
the silver ore. Andy: Desperate to get the silver I need, I ventured off to some of the abandoned mines. I
definitely would not recommend exploring old mines as there is abundance of risks involved with it, and every year people die because of it. I
made sure to stick to mines which had obvious recent human activity and only ventured in a small way in.
This is a mine (chuckles)
This one actually had a mattress further back, but I didn't really want to look too close at that
Plus there was an angry bat in my way
Off to the side, I found a pile of loose rocks and found a distinctive black line
Eric had told me to look for for the silver ore. So that could be silver?
Alright, well, collected a little
possibly silver ore here. But I'm not a geologist or a miner. So who knows what I actually grabbed?
So for some help seeing if I even grabbed anything with even a trace of silver, I met up with someone who does know. Cody.
So I'm here with Cody from Cody's Lab Cody: Hi everyone Andy: So I collected some ore from an abandoned
silver mine that may or may not have silver, might have, uh, uranium.
Cody: All right Andy: Have a look at this. Cody: Immediately
I can tell this is mud stone and some sandstone pieces here
The dark sheen there is probably just manganese dioxide. Although it could be...
Uh, Uranium, Uranium does that as well. There's an easy way to tell, and that's to get a Geiger counter
Yeah, so it's not screaming so it's probably not
Uranium Andy: Anything dangerous?
Cody: No, this is probably less than a banana
If I had to guess - and if anything contains silver would be the sandstone here
Andy: Yeah Cody: Can grind up some of the mud stone, some sandstone, and do like a little fire assay
Break it into little pieces here.
I'll finish crushing them with this
All right
There I've got a bucket of assay flux
which is pre-mixed
for doing assays
This is orange because it's got lead oxide mixed with it.
At high temperatures will react to the lead oxide, forming lead metal and the lead will collect any
pieces of ore
Or you know, the metals that are there
into a bead which we can more easily work with. We'll take that out and put it into this little bone ash pot
which is really just
Literally bones that have been burnt to ash
Andy: Oh really?
Cody: So it's a calcium phosphate, and this is absorbent to the lead oxide, but not lead metal
Andy: Yeah
Cody: So the lead as it oxidizes, it'll just kind of absorb in there
and we will be left with a bead of precious metals. There we go. That's our assay charge
Andy: So they're gonna melt and basically make the glass?
Cody: Yeah, so it'll be like a really runny liquid glass
Andy: Okay. And then the... the metal will-
They'll sink, cause they're heavy, yeah
So there's that one. Judging by how much rock we are using
We'll probably wind up with a tiny tiny bead that you'll need a lens to see. So there's those two ores
Takes a long time to crush samples by hand. So that's running. You gotta set it for 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
Zinc coming off. We're now above the boiling point of zinc
There's the lid, there's your slag, which actually is pretty clear.
That's most of it
You can see I've propped the furnace open with so there Coupole there
That's just to let oxygen get in there so it can burn away the lid
Pull this out. See it's
oxidized away
Looks like there might be a little bit of a bead of metal down in there
So that one's actually bigger Oh
looks like
Yeah
You can actually probably see that on camera there
Let's put this one down in the furnace
Get it working. See it melting?
There it is.
It'll be the silver. Is that considered high-grade ore or low-grade? Right on the verge of being profitable
We succeeded in extracting a little bit of silver, just a few beads, uh, but I did actually have silver ore
Yeah, now I have actual silver. So thanks for all the help Cody. Cody: Alright, no problem
Thanks to Cody
I could confirm that I had managed to collect at least some low-grade silver ore but it should hopefully yield something
So back home, I repeated Cody's method of extracting it; first grinding and milling the ore
Then make my own assay mix.
Which create a lead mix, which absorb the silver and separate it from the other impurities
Then melt this on a cute ball
Which would absorb the lead and leave behind a bead of pure silver. With such low-grade ore, this could take quite a few batches
But by slowly doing larger and larger batches, I was able to collect more and more
Unfortunately the damage caused in my obsidian experiment earlier ended up doing my kiln in.
So I'll have to switch to the propane Forge to finish off the last few batches of my most concentrated silver.
(Talking to Cameraman) Did you get that?
At this point I'm going to collect all the different silvers I've extracted now, including the ones Cody did, and
Combine them together, melt it down one more time, pour it out and try and separate it all of this slag
[Shouting "No" Repeatedly]
And then I'm going to put it inside of one more crucible to extract any the remaining lead that might not have gotten out before
And then I should hopefully have a sizable amount of pure silver enough to maybe make a coin
All right, so got my silver and
It weighs about 5.541 grams
Not that valuable. Today's price
it's about $2.78 cents, which I definitely put in more money than that to get this out.
So not the most profitable, but I have the silver. In theory, this should be mostly pure silver
I don't know it's exact value though,
so I'm gonna hopefully find somebody to assess it for me, and give me an actual number. And
my extraction method wasn't really the greatest, I could see there's a lot of potential silver still in the slag
Probably gonna try and revisit and try and extract the rest of the silver get a little bit more of a workable amount
But for my first goal
I'm gonna attempt to make a coin out of this, and I actually have enough
Where the gold I was a little bit short on, now, I have enough silver. So I'm gonna continue the evolution of money and
Attempt to mint my own coin using the silver
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