posted on Feb, 18 2012 @ 11:36 PM

As informed ATS mermbers, I’m sure you’re all perfectly aware of the extreme volatility in the current global financial market and even more aware of how our money buys less and less and less as the years go by. What’s also very apparent to those that watch the precious metals market e.g. silver and gold, that contrary to the value of paper based currency which has been continuously decreasing, that the value of silver and gold has been on a continual increase.

Here’s a couple of graphs showing the improvement of silver over the last 30 and 60 days.

Now over the last few years, I’ve been taking scrap, old, unwanted and broken items containing silver and refining them in such a way as to end up with essentially 99.9% silver bullion. Originally this was nothing more than a home hobby of sorts but with the value of silver and gold bullion apparently on an increasing trend, what started out as just a hobby has now become a means of creating silver bullion as a long term investment. I get quite a kick in checking the silver markets and watching the value of my silver slowly rise

And so I figured that now would be a perfect opportunity to share my experience in silver bullion creation at home with other ATS members who may have an interest.

Not only will you end up being able to create pure silver bullion of your own, but you’ll also see how ridiculously simple and easy the process is and that the majority of equipment is easily obtainable and very inexpensive.

In fact, over the years I’ve simplified the entire process so that anyone can do it. So why not read this tutorial and perhaps give it a go yourself.

If there’s sufficient positive response, I’ll consider doing a similar thread and show once again how ridiculously easy it is to process and refine old, scrap, broken, etc gold items into 99.9% 24k gold ingots at home using essentially the same basic and inexpensive equipment used to produce silver bullion.

Just to whet your appetite, here’s a pic of some pure silver bullion buttons that I’ve made:

and here’s a pic of a 24k gold button (8 gms) I made earlier today. and worth approx. $US443 at todays market rates. hopefully next week will be worth a bit more

We need some basic equipment which consists of a plastic water spray bottle, a plastic spoon, a plastic swizzle stick, a plastic turkey baster pipette and a small plastic funnel.

We need a couple of small glass cylinders and in my case, I used some empty spice jars from the kitchen. At least that’s what I told my wife

Also need a small glass bowl able to stand up to boiling water and that will allow one of the spice jars to be placed upright in it. The boiling water poured into the bowl will help heat the contents of the spice jar.

We will also need some cheap disposable plastic gloves such as the ones used for food handling.

We’ll also need some coffee filters. Again, both of these items were purchased at the cheap store for a couple of dollars.

The next item that we’ll need is a bottle of 70% strength Nitric acid. This is readily obtainable from the majority of chemical supply companies which you’ll have no problems in finding in your local yellow pages. A 500 ml bottle will be quite adequate.

The nitric acid is used to dissolve the silver and any other contaminating metals in the silver such as copper, etc. We need to eventually remove the contaminants leaving behind pure silver for final processing.

At this point, a couple of WARNINGS are required, so PLEASE PAY ATTENTION.

Nitric acid, by it’s nature is a powerful corrosive acid and skin contact should be avoided. When working with it, you should ALWAYS be wearing those disposable plastic gloves that we purchased earlier.

Simple care, caution and common sense is all that’s needed and you’ll be perfectly safe. In all the years that I’ve been refining silver and gold for a hobby and using nitric acid, not once has there been an issue or concern. If any is spilled on a surface, just immediately rinse off with plain water.

Also, small quantities of nitrogen dioxide gas is produced so ALWAYS do the refining outside in the open air.

The motto is: Be careful and be safe.

But let me reiterate one more time. if you exercise common sense and basic care, this entire procedure is perfectly safe. Again, I’ve been doing this for quite a few years with NO mishaps whatsoever.

And to complete our refining kit, we need someway of melting the raw silver into the shiny metal that people have lusted after for millenia

Thankfully, all we need to do is head to the nearest hardware store and get something along the lines of this badboy. a propane powered torch. This is the one I use because it has a self-igniting switch built in, so no need to use matches to get it going. Also has a rotary button to control the strength of the flame. No problems whatsoever in finding one as they’re a common handyman item and it easily melts silver and gold.

As for the material containing silver that will be processed, sure you could use old bits of silver jewelry or anything else that you’ve got lying around with a reasonable silver content. But personally, I found the simplest way to get all my raw silver items is in the form of old coins containing silver and purchased on eBay. Quite often you can get some really good deals.

As an example, last week I purchased a half kilo of out of circulation Australian sixpence coins dating back to the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. By themselves as coins, they’re worth next to nothing and don’t have much intrinsic value. But each one of the coins has a 50% silver / 50% copper makeup that makes them a perfect source of silver. Sure beats trying to dig it out of the ground the hard way

Ok, for the purpose of this tutorial, lets process 2 of those coins and recover the pure silver from them.

The coins weigh in total 6 gms but because they’re a 50/50 mix of silver/copper, the actual amount of silver works out to be 3 gms.

To recover the silver component, we need to completely dissolve the 2 coins in a 50/50 mixture of nitric acid and water. The amount of nitric acid required will be approximately 17mls mixed with approximately 17 mls of water. Using the plastic pipette, the water is added first followed by the nitric acid.