Building a small silver recovery unit

Well frustrations with the small silver buckets have me investigating
building my own silver recovery system.

If anyone out there has any references, input, has done that and would
like to share the design and how it works, it would be greatly appreciated.

It really looks like it could be done fairly simply with a low voltage
current, two simple means to conduct it through the fluids, and a means
to keep the fluid moving.

Thanks in advance

Mark

I don't know how small a unit you want. I produce only about a gallon of
spent fixer per month, and I bought a complete inexpensive precipitator from
Porters camera (
http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchan... ory_Code=D1H).
I guess you could add a pump to circulate the spent fixer, but mine seems to
work well using convection only. It takes up to several days to treat a
gallon of spent fixer. I'm not sure how efficient it is (what the final
concentration of silver remaining in suspension is).

"Mark B" wrote in message
news:yM7zg.1343$ee1.1339@trnddc06...
Well frustrations with the small silver buckets have me investigating
building my own silver recovery system.

If anyone out there has any references, input, has done that and would
like to share the design and how it works, it would be greatly
appreciated.

It really looks like it could be done fairly simply with a low voltage
current, two simple means to conduct it through the fluids, and a means to
keep the fluid moving.

Thanks in advance

Mark

"Pieter Litchfield" wrote
I don't know how small a unit you want. I produce only about a gallon of
spent fixer per month, and I bought a complete inexpensive precipitator
from Porters camera
http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchan... ory_Code=D1H).


Looks good. The yeild number is a bit deceptive: "30-50
oz of silver/year if you use as little as a gallon of
fix/month".

1 gallon of fix does ~200 8x10's. 50 weeks of 200 =
10,000 8x10's / year to get 50 oz of silver. $550
from $4,000 of paper at $11/oz for silver. Refining
costs are ???, the local scrap dealer gives about 0.10
on the dollar for metal of unknown purity.

Steel wool in a bucket works if all you want to do is
keep the silver from going into the drains.

From the above 100 8x10's [an amount I can get my
head around] produces 0.5 oz of silver.

All numbers +/- an order of 2.


--
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer: Electronics, Photonics, Informatics.
Remove blanks to reply: n o lindan at ix . netcom . com
f-Stop enlarging timers: http://www.nolindan.com/da/fstop/

Nicholas O. Lindan spake thus:

Steel wool in a bucket works if all you want to do is
keep the silver from going into the drains.

I'd be interested in learning more about this method, since as you point
out, one isn't really going to make it economically feasible to recover
silver on such a small scale; the main thing should be not harming the
environment.

So how does this work? How effective is it?


--
I think someone should unplug the entire Internet and let us start
all over again. This time, make sure that Sergey Brin, Larry Page,
Jimmy Wales, and any admins from Wikipedia are not allowed to play,
by order of the U.N. Security Council or whatever.

- Daniel Brandt, on Wikipedia Review (http://wikipediareview.com)

Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:

From the above 100 8x10's [an amount I can get my
head around] produces 0.5 oz of silver.

Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio


Give or take very little, by far most projection speed
papers contain on average 1.6 grams silver per square
meter; 20 8x10s. Total, 8 grams or a 1/4 plus oz per
100. That is if none of the silver has been turned
to image silver. Dan

In article . com,
wrote:

Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:

From the above 100 8x10's [an amount I can get my
head around] produces 0.5 oz of silver.

Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio


Give or take very little, by far most projection speed
papers contain on average 1.6 grams silver per square
meter; 20 8x10s. Total, 8 grams or a 1/4 plus oz per
100. That is if none of the silver has been turned
to image silver. Dan

Correct, I once tried to get someone interested in buying the silver
paper we discarded from Forte returns of goods. One guy said are you
serious- Agfa sends it to us by the Tractor trailer truck load and that
barely is worthwhile.
--
Reality-Is finding that perfect picture
and never looking back.

www.gregblankphoto.com

wrote in message
Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
From the above 100 8x10's produce 0.5 oz of silver.
Give or take very little, by far most projection speed
papers contain on average 1.6 grams silver per square
meter; 20 8x10s. Total, 8 grams or a 1/4 plus oz per
100. That is if none of the silver has been turned
to image silver. Dan

Sounds copacetic, I'm sure the silver recovery
folks were being as generous as possible ...

So, more realistically:

1/8 oz of silver/100 sheets 8x10 [1/2 the silver in the image]
120 8x10 sheets / gallon fix
1 gallon fix / week
50 wks / year

= 7.5 oz / year recovered silver at 1 gal/wk of fixer consumption,
manufacturer claimed "30 - 50 oz".

In any case it stops silver salts from entering whatever it
is one's drains empty into.

On 31 Jul 2006 15:18:14 -0700,
wrote:

Total, 8 grams or a 1/4 plus oz


August 1, 2006, from Lloyd Erlick,

I'd much rather discuss silver weights in
grams. I'm pretty sure the way silver is sold
is in Troy ounces, which are equivalent to 20
grams (from memory ...). Then there are the
ounces that are sixteen per pound. There must
be a poem about grams being grams ...

regards,
--le
________________________________
Lloyd Erlick Portraits, Toronto.
website: www.heylloyd.com
telephone: 416-686-0326
email:
________________________________
--

"Lloyd Erlick" Lloyd at @the-wire. dot com,
hailing from the land of the Imperial Gallon wrote:
wrote:
Total, 8 grams or a 1/4 plus oz
I'd much rather discuss silver weights in
grams. I'm pretty sure the way silver is sold
is in Troy ounces

Google pondered mightily spake thus:

1 Troy Oz = 31.10 grams
1 regular folks' ounce = 28.35 grams

But you could convince me of most any conversion
factor.

1 troy (French) oz = 480 grains
= 12 pennyweights
12 troy oz = 1 troy lb.
14.58 troy oz = 1 pedestrian lb.
32.15 troy oz = 1 French Kilogram

The English didn't use the metric measuring
system because it was invented by the French;
America carries on this proud tradition.

The troy oz is said to have originated in
France and moved to England with William
the Conqueror.

Well as the one that started this I was far less concerned about whether
it was smart from an economic point of view. For the volumes I do I
know its not. The buckets are a pain. I don't have the resources to
spend the kind of cash it would take to buy the factory made ones.
Those run into the thousands and that investment would be far better
spent on a large format Epson 9600 inkjet printer than a recovery system.

An electric current pulling metal out of a solution has been around
since ancient man. Ancient coins were gold and silver plated,so the
current even as small as a dry cell battery should do it. Yes it must
be DC, but thats no big deal. I was hoping to find someone that had
actually done this before so I don't have to re invent the wheel.

Mark