Do not hassle with the impure silver, unless you see it as an adventure in its own to purify AgNO3 from impure silver sources. If your goal is pure
and clean AgNO3, then I simply would go for buying a fine 99.9% silver bullion from an eBay seller, dissolve that in HNO3 and slowly evaporate to
dryness. One recrystallize from distilled water removes last traces of acid. With one troy ounce of silver from eBay you get appr. 50 grams of AgNO3
and the price of this will be $20 ... $25, which actually is a good price for AgNO3.
I myself have experimented with silver solder from a hardware store, but it indeed is quite a hassle. The hot Al/AlCl3 method is not really good for
making pure silver. You must do it the wet way, making a precipitate of AgCl, rinsing with a lot of water and then dissolving this in ammonia. With a
suitable strong reductor (e.g. ascorbic acid, hydroquinone or maybe even glucose) you can make silver from this and the precipitated metal then must
be rinsed well and melted in a crucible. All organic crap and other impurities will separate from the molten silver. But as you can see, this also is
not that easy.
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