Turning Old Jewelry into a Mirror
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
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In this video I obliterate some old silver jewelry and refine it using my homemade nitric acid to obtain some silver metal which I then magically transform into a real, high quality mirror while trying hard not to contaminate everything with copper.
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Also, excuse me for my poor speaking, english is not my native language so I have some trouble speaking it, in case you don't understand something there are always subtitles made by me.
Please don't comment about how stupid I am to wear nitrile gloves when handling nitric acid, I am aware of the dangers and don't need hundreds of people trashing the comment section.
0:00 Intro
3:07 Making Pure Nitric Acid From Potassium Nitrate
5:00 Dissolving The Silver In Acid
8:40 Melting Some Copper Cable
10:12 Separating The Silver From Copper
12:41 Making Pure Silver Nitrate
14:24 Making Silver Mirrors Using The Tollen's Reagent
18:38 Outro
#chemistry
#experiment
#beautiful
#demonstration
#science
#interesting
#silver
#mirror
#jewellery
#cool
#copper - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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the destruction of antique jewelry for this purpose instead of like $10 of silver shot hurts my silver loving gremlin soul
To separate silver from copper, silver should be precipitated out as the chloride from the mixed nitrates using plain table salt solution in excess. Then the copper nitrate solution can easily be decanted from the heavy precipitate which should be washed several times with boiling distilled water afterwards.
Then the silver choride can be completely reduced to silver powder with nascent hydrogen generated from zinc granules and dilute hydrochloric acid in the mixture over night. Next day, after decanting, the silver powder has to be washed with dilute ammonia solution, dilute formic acid and several times again with boiling water until the washing water doesn't show off chloride or silver ions anymore (can be tested with silver nitrate and sodium chloride solution).
The powder can then be transfered into small holes previously drilled into pieces of charcoal and melted together to small shiny granules with the help of a strong blowtorch. This step will also clean the silver from the last impurities. Fire clay bricks should be layed out underneath because they won't break from the heat.
For refining silver using nitric acid in the EU legally you need a corresponding business license for metal works.
There is a better way and its cheaper and faster. You percipitate the silver chloride exactly the same way as you said but for reduction you will use NaOH and sucrose(table sugar) you add NaOH to silver chloride and it turns into black AgO2 and the you add sugar into it right away stirr it and you got 99.99 silver in an hour.
That's an interesting method, because it would avoid the formation of environmental hazardous zinc salts. But there's one disadvantage: silver oxide promotes the formation of collodial particles which are impossible to filter off, so that you cannot simply dispose off the filtrate down the drain, too.
@@experimental_chemistry when you add NaOH to silver chloride you dont do it while the AgCl is in a suspention you decant as much water as possible and just leave the moist AgCl and then you add NaOH directly on it. This makes the convertion much faster. And after you get Ag2O you again directly add sugar to reduce the silver, you dont wash it while it is in the Ag2O form so it doesn't get in the environement. After you reduce the silver then you wash it.
@@natuhaysertkaya3391
From the point you have silver oxide in the mixture you will partially get nanoparticles that can't be filtered off - even not after reduction. You can recognize it by the color of the filtrate: it's not completely colorless but slightly grey or brownish.
So this route isn't as clean as the reduction by nascent hydrogen.
Could you make a COPPER MIRROR??? oh PLEASE give it a shot :) (or maybe even gold LOL j/k)
I will definitely make the copper one sometime :)
This has been on my bucket list for ages, time to finally make myself some nitric acid
This is one of the first demo's i did when i got my current job as a R&D chemist. Found some silver nitrate, 30%ammonia, and sodium hydroxide and mirrored some petri dishes. Just gotta be careful not to accidently go down the silver fulminate route, or things can get energetic >
Just don't involve alcohol while you're doing it....
I would have turned all of the silver to silver fulminate before even thinking of making a mirror!
You're right. That mirror is pretty awesome! I've seen "real" mirrors when I was young. They all looked like yours did right before you cleaned it. I always thought they were broken because they didn't mirror like brand new ones did. 😂
A procedure I read in old books is to separate the copper and silver by evaporating the mix of nitrates down and heating it to melting. The copper nitrate decomposes and the silver nitrate stays behind and is then dissolved out. I want to try this, it saves nitric acid because no need to redissolve the silver later on to get the silver nitrate.
Instead of using copper to drop out the silver, it works much better to add HCl and precipitate silver chloride. Then, convert the silver chloride to silver metal with sodium hydroxide and sugar.
Thank you, I will use this method the next time :)
Wow, the outcome of this was so impressive. Chemistry is awesome!
i just wanted to say ive been watching your videos for a while now and i really am happy to see your channel grow!!! your videos are getting better and better every time :)
Hey, I'm on a keto diet and can't enjoy certain foods. Could you make a video on efficient methods to separate sugar from mixtures, like honey or fruit juice/powder? It would be super helpful! Thanks!
The visuals in this video are on point. Thank you for another awesome video!
Awesome project the final result of the mirror was beautiful! Very satisfying metal chemistry.
Glad you liked it!
this channel is going places. awesome video as always
You can MASSIVELY cut down on your purification steps and reagent costs if you had taken the silver powder and boiled it with water several times. This will greatly reduce the amount of copper left in it after the initial precipitation
First-surface mirrors, nice.
Cool mirror 🎉❤
Thank you :)
I'd love to see you cover the electrolitic silver refining process in a video. It's so pretty when the huge crystals of silver form when done that way (you can do gold too, but the silver one is actually useful as a refining process where as with the gold one you have to start with already very pure gold, so it's kind of pointless. Plus the silver one looks way cooler and prettier as the gold forms as a brown gold dust crust, where as the silver forms in huge crystals of pure silver)!
I remember once i made like 300ml of 90% nitric acid behind my shed in a super cramped(and low ventilation) space over like 2 days with a distilation aparatus i borrowed from my school☠☠☠☠☠☠
haha thats sketchy. especially when you didnt have any experience with such stuff exept from school
Borrowed
Nice blue crystals. 13:17
Super nice! I think I might try this! One thing, do you need pure nitric acid? I feel like just high concentration should be pure enough. Please never stop uploading! I always feel so sad when I see chemistry channels like yours which are so good but don't get the recognition they deserve. I've tried making a few videos on chemistry and it is really hard! Not only to do the experiment but to film it, edit it, etc. Good job!
Thank you! The nitric acid just has to be pure and the concentration can very greatly, if its higher than something like 20% it should work. Also, I don't plan to stop uploading in at lest a few years, however I now have to go on a little break to sort out some things on my side :)
Name should be Amateur Alchemy👌🏼
That was something you were the most happy about? I'm still trying to get phosphorus out of Bones!
awesome bro.😮
Actually having very pure copper in an oxygen free cable DOES help with sound quality - but ONLY AT VERY HIGH WATTAGE..... like those big subwoofers in competition level builds... where they turn the entire cargo space of a van into the speaker box, with 8 speakers receiving 8,000 each... YEA.. THEN IT MATTERS lol :D
1-2% higher conductivity means they should just be using thicker wire
Also helps with very low power levels, like with passive electric instruments. But a tiny pre-amp is better.
Just use a thicker guage or a preamp, lol
thicker wire???
Should be using silver wires instead
1:19 You CAN get it from a hardware store. Silver solder is something like 5% silver, just get, like, 10 kg, and process it.
Cheaper to go to a thrift/consignment shop and pick up some sterling silverware or old jewelry. less base metals too
@@Emu0181 Actually, that does sound like a better idea
You will almost never find silver cheaper than it's current market rate, you'll be paying extra for jewelry for labor costs. Just buy silver bullion off a website.
I‘m so used to Nile Red’s videos that at 0:45 i was expecting a big and heavy object to hit the mirror and break it…
Get a MICROWAVE KILN !!
You'll be able to use a microwave to melt a bunch of metals (it can hit about 900C, but you could push it higher)
Oh, and it's like $50... totally a fun tool to have (I have a microwave devoted to it).
That's a great idea, I will probably buy one sometime :)
Perfectly , super !!!
Perfect
12:09 what's the point of weighing the recovered blob of silver, when the starting silver jewelry & coin wasn't weighed?
Try making a photo in similar way
Precipitate silver and filter
rinse with water and filter
wash whit hot HCl and filter
rinse with water and filter
your silver is now pure
😂
Maybe you could find some could glass 'ornaments' that are fun, and cool, and awesome, and likeable..... and you could coat them in a mirror and auction them off to raise more money for the channel 🤷♂ BUT as I was typing this I realized that you had to put that spray coating on the back of the mirror so it doesn't come of... but that surface is nor mirrored... so you couldn't put a mirror on on to a glass object unless it was hollow and you could put the mirror on the inside..... hrmmm yea Something like that would be pretty hard to find, and expensive.... but if you happen to come across something like that, it would make for a neat video and probably help the channel out :)
Fancy & especially overly-thick audio cables are actually only partially snake-oil: because speakers are an inductive & resistive load, have harmonics (etc. etc.) even the tiniest additional resistive loads in-series do genuinely add changes to the output. If you have fancy systems with crossovers and no feedback with tube amps, these changes are greatly increased.
However, listening to already compressed music @ a small fraction of maximum power of the circuit & with high-NFB digital systems & short cables makes all of this irrelevant, so then this becomes a pointless money dump. So in the end the cable quality depends on the system & the setup, especially wire lengths, massively.
A simple proof of the former is a Power Supply I made, it was a DC 30mF (30,000uF!)-capacitor Full-Wave centre-tapped secondary ~30V supply; at first the voltage was like 27-28V & I was confused why it was so much lower than I predicted, however after making the cables ridiculously-thick the voltage was correct. Now, here's the thing, original cables were more than adequate & actually were for much higher current than I was going to use, however because the capacitance is so insane, the power-pulses from the rectifiers were in the tens of amps even though the drain was
Do, da da doo da, da da dooo, Ba dom dom dom dom dom dom dom ba.
Im working on a fume hood
Good video
Btw i just found out that by using electricity u can make hcl and naoh from nacl(aq) in two containers with a salt bridge between them.
I also did it with na2so4 to make naoh and h2so4. Note that the naoh will form in the container with the electrode connect to the negative battery terminal and h2so4 on the positive battery terminal.
This is because the na + is moved to a different container by the current and so4 -2 is also sent to a different container by the current. They both react with water to form naoh and h2so4. I dont now if it works with all salt but it should work with most.
i am hurt because of the destruction of that silver coin. U could sell it and buy even more silver.
👍👍👍
Damn nice mirror fr fr
mya I ask what does the fr mean?
@@marekvojta9648shorthand for „ferrous“, meaning iron like. It‘s used as slang to mean something is hard --> good
@@klausschmidt8147 Oh thanks
I think he was joking, fr just mean for real @@marekvojta9648
I bet you payed more for that "audiofile" speaker cable, than the silver jewlery! xD
how many imperial freektonnes to a metric freektonne? The Americans will not understand without a conversion factor ;)
No discord server ?
🤙✌️🖖
Break it now
I am not Nile Red :)
@@Amateur.Chemistry dam
I Can send You Some 9999 Copper Bars :)
They would definitely come in handy, you can give my your contact info :)
Great videos and very educational, but could you please speak a little slower. It is hard for me to follow your English. No offense, please.😊
Thanks! I will try to speak a little slower in future videos, I am actually working on improving my English speaking for a long time, and such constructive criticism really helps :)
Question: are you speaking in Chinese or Russian?
This video pains mw to watch, i have made much better pure silver drom.some soviet switches and other things.
Have copper bars too,.i can.send yiu some small ones. ;)😊