Reclaiming precious metal confusion

Silver is so cheap it's not worth the effort? At over $7 a Troy Oz you can almost get an ounce out of 2 or 3 heavy duty contactors. They are often found in the trash cans behind shops that do heavy electrical work. Almost every relay has a pair of silver buttons in it. The higher the current, the bigger the buttons. They get a blackish tinge when they are worn.

I had a mayonnaise jar full of contacts, and melted them down to a big silver slab.

Dig deep my friends, there be treasure in them chests

Bright blue ?

Here is an image of my junk pile. Any power relay (contactor) used to switch heavy current will usually have a Silver contact point, as they don't corrode or oxidize like other metals, forming a high resistance contact. Almost all switches have some silver in them, which is why the price is high. Often the metal under the silver button is brass or copper, but it is also silver plated to improve the connection. Purifying the metals is another subject, and obviously there will be lots of Copper, Zinc and others

Thanks Mr.Wizard, exactly the pic I was hoping for.

Lambda: My bad, my silver is only 99.9% fine silver, not 99.99%, oops. I dissolved a bit under a troy ounce in only 25-30mL of 70% nitric acid, I do not remember the exact numbers but it was stoichiometric with 1mL excess nitric and to prevent loss of of nitric during dissolving it was done under reflux.

After dissolving the silver in 70%, there was a distinct blue color to the solid in the bottom of the RBF. There was not nearly enough water in the RBF to dissolve all the AgNO3 formed, so the mimimal ammount of water to dissolve all the salts was added and then filtered to remove the indissolved Ag2S that had coated the bar. This solution was then evaporated and I was left with way-to-blue-to-be-pure crystalls in the bottom of the evaporating dish. On closer examination of the contents of the dish, it appeared that a 'skin' of impure blue silver nitrate had formed a layer over some nearly pure silver nitrate crysals with 5mm distance between the impure and the pure. These were separated by hand and the impure was dissolved and allowed to evaporate again. The same layers formed and I was again able to separate the pure from impure by hand. I ended up with 20g of nearly transparent silver nitrate crystals with only the slightest hint of blue and 20g of the bright blue copper contaminated silver nitrate crystals. The silver was reclaimed from the bright blue ones by reducing with copper wire yielding the finest of silver crystals, which surprisingly were able to react with 70% nitric at room temperature.

Are they a coppery flat stick about 3mm (1/8" wide and about half as thick, 30-40 cm long? It could be what they called silver solder in the air conditioning and plumbing trade. They also might contain some Phosphorus, as their other name is Sil-Phos. I think it's added to reduce bubbling or something like that. Take it into consideration when you are dissolving it in acid.

yep

aqua disolve watch out for the no2 gas.
if you dont get any gas its not working.
make aqua from one part nitric acid to 3 parts hydrochloric.
once disolved distill multiple time but never to dryness by adding hydrochloric acid when nearly dry.
once all nitric is gone dilute with water
then percipitate with your choice of reducing agent (ferrous ion, oxalic or formic acid, sulfites and so2, metalic zinc
ect ect)

collect your gold and wish you lived in oz near a reef

now other metals

if you want the plat group out of a solution it gets harder.
you must be more selective of your reducing agents.
first a oxalic acid drop is my choice then
ammonium chloride to get the group.
fire up the group then redisolve in clean
aqua.
oxidize solution to put palladium in a different oxidation state than platinium.
drop Pt with ammonium chloride. then
make solution basic with ammonia to drop
Pd

if you want silver buy a braclet
Os and others are realy hard and require
molten alkali disolves (realy nasty)

silver