Today I wanted to do a continuation video of our smelting
series
Today we are going to be looking at how to remove the copper
from your copper button that we poured in the previous video
and I will post a link to that on the video so you can check it out
last video we smelted some black sands using copper to collect the metal.
and I want to show you how I'm going to remove the copper
to get the gold and the silver out
this is about
7 or 8 of those little pyramids we made in the previous video
I melted them all down in the same kiln we used for smelting
and I poured them into a 4 inch piece of channel
So I could increase there surface area, I want a lot of surface area
For the electroplating solution can get to the copper
I'm going to use this DC power source
and mix up a solution of copper sulfate and sulfuric acid
I have two pieces of stainless steal that will be connected to the cathode
or the negative terminal
and I'm going to hang the copper
right down between the two
pieces of stainless there
and that will be the anode, so the copper is going to plate
from the copper piece that will hang right here onto the stainless steal
cathodes
The gold and silver will not go into solution
and they will fall out as the anodes slime into the bottom of our bucket
here is the recipe I will be using
about 30 ounces per gallon of copper sulfate
about 8 ounces a gallon of sulfuric acid
and volts between 1 and 3
Here is a gallon of water
this is what i'm going to using as my copper sulfate
its septic tank root killer
but the active ingredient is 99% copper sulfate pentahydrate
Which is just a hydrated form of copper sulfate
and here is my sulfuric acid
both of these I got at the hardware store
this is for drain cleaner, drain opener
here is what the copper sulfate crystals look like
they are just gonna go right in the water
and I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of it in there
going to stir that around til all that dissolves
if it all dissolves i'm going to poor more in
and if it doesn't all dissolve I'm going to decant the solution
back into the 5 gallon bucket there
so we don't have any standing crystals on the bottom
then I will add my sulfuric acid
and we will start plating
Now I'm going to take my copper bar here
and break it in probably 3 pieces
that weighs about 3.5 pounds
so I'm going to break it into smaller manageable pieces
to plate each one, one at a time
There's my copper piece we are going to plate out
I have a good strong clamp on there and its just holding it
you want to make sure your clamp doesn't enter the solution or it will plate out
I'll switch on the power
running about half a volt
and about 9 amps
We are going to check on our plating process here
it's been just about 24 hours since we put it in
oh yeah, you can see our copper is all covered in
black anode slimes there
I'm going to try and just giver her a little dunk.
get the camera in the right spot here
You can see all the black anode slime washed off and you can see the copper coming through
here is a look at our cathode
that's some nice copper getting plated on there.
oh yeah, that's some good copper there
I pulled out one of the stainless steal cathodes
I just gave it a little bend and bent the stainless
you can see the whole
a whole copper sheet comes right off
you have a clean cathode and you can start over
The copper from our 24 hour plating experiment
we got 109 grams
thats how much copper was plated out in 24 hours
it will all depend on the voltage the current
surface area of the anode but that just gives some kind of idea
in the ballpark of what we can plate in a 24 hour period
alright, it's been 9 days since we started
we have finished plating out all 3 pieces of the bar
You can see here a whole bunch of copper and stuff we plated off
the cathodes
pealed off the cathodes
here is some other copper, it got a little spongy towards the end
You can see its not a nice solid plates, it's kind of crumbly
great part of this is now we can take all the copper here
that we have a whole lot of surface area with
and even some of this spongy copper we can break up into essentially copper powder
and use it for the smelting process and just keep recycling the copper over and over again
This is a little piece here of one of our anodes
and what I did is
as it sat in the solution plating
there was a piece across the top
that was out of the solution so it did not plate out
when they got to about
When they got to about 10% of the remaining copper in the soltuion
I turned it over
so that the big thick plate was in the solution so I could clamp it
here at the top where it was real thin
I'm left with, I don't know about 20 grams of copper there
and I can just put this back in
with this stuff and use it as a collector metal and recycle it
nothing is lost and we will use it all over again
This is the solution we used for the plating, as you can see it's gotten quite dark.
due to impurities that came off the copper anode
There is a bunch of black sludge in the bottom of that stuff that is the anode slimes
That's where all of our precious metals are going to be
I'm going to filter
the anode slime's out using a couple of coffee filters
and a funnel
and after thats done
we can smelt down the anode slime's and get our precious metals out
here is our funnel
Put a couple pieces of copper wire down there to act as ribs
so that the solution can drain down the filter a little faster
Just going to use some coffee filters in there
and now I can pour the solution
through the coffee filters
I found the best way to do this is to decant
the stuff off the top using a little smaller jug
and that way you can keep all the sediment at the bottom
Until the end so it doesn't clog your filter up
I just pour my solution into the filter, let it drain and repeat
until all the solution has been taken out
We are getting down to the bottom of our solution here
You can see I switched over to a shop towel here
It will go a little bit faster, a little bit coarser filter
we will get the majority of the large stuff out and filter it with coffee filters later
here is the bottom of the solution
You can see all the black sludge down there
I don't know if you can see in the video but there is some
copper left
that flakes off the cathode as your plating
What I'm going to do
i take a piece of probably 30 mesh stainless steal screen
That I'm going to pour the
the anodes slime's through so that it will catch those big pieces of copper
so were not fighting copper when we smelt down
anode slime's, because that's counter productive
It's been a couple of hours and our stuff has drained through our filters here
You can see all the black sludge that's left over
All clinging to the paper
What I'm going to do over the next couple of days is get this dried out pretty good
peel it off the filter paper we used
and I will make another video here when I smelt this down
with some oxidizing flux and get our precious metals out
Thanks for watching this segment of our smelting and refining series
I will be posting another video when I have a chance
of the smelting of our anode slime's here
I will post a link to that at the end of this video
when it's available
I appreciate you guy's watching
and stay tuned for more videos