How to turn junk silver into good casting grain for later use?
I have alot of scrap silver that I want to melt into casting grain..I have a furnace that I have melted silver in before but I cant seem to get the nice small grains for ease of melting later..I also have some .999 fine that I want to turn into sterling casting grain..Any help would be great
Thanks
generally I don’t think it’s worth the bother. The problem is that your sterling silver is an alloy, and whenever you melt it, some of the metal with a lower melting point vaporizes. Repeated melting and casting doesn’t really improve the metal.
I never bothered to convert scrap metal in an extra step into casting grain. But out of curiosity I looked it up and it’s apparently done by pouring molten metal into a large bucket of water. Sounds not entirely safe, but I guess if the quantity of the metal used at one time isn’t too great it shouldn’t be too bad if you keep your head out of the hot steam and wear a faceshield.
Not sure about turning fine silver into sterling silver, because I think there are quite a number of different alloys of sterling silver which have different additives beside copper. If you really want to try that I would search through some books for professional jewelers. I think it will require some reading for if you want to use it for anything you want to sell you have to make sure you still have the required silver content.
generally I don’t think it’s worth the bother. The problem is that your sterling silver is an alloy, and whenever you melt it, some of the metal with a lower melting point vaporizes. Repeated melting and casting doesn’t really improve the metal.
I never bothered to convert scrap metal in an extra step into casting grain. But out of curiosity I looked it up and it’s apparently done by pouring molten metal into a large bucket of water. Sounds not entirely safe, but I guess if the quantity of the metal used at one time isn’t too great it shouldn’t be too bad if you keep your head out of the hot steam and wear a faceshield.
Not sure about turning fine silver into sterling silver, because I think there are quite a number of different alloys of sterling silver which have different additives beside copper. If you really want to try that I would search through some books for professional jewelers. I think it will require some reading for if you want to use it for anything you want to sell you have to make sure you still have the required silver content.
References :
I agree with answer 1 but will extend it. Because you need to declare a given purity, you would be better off selling the stuff to a refining operation (like the process done at Roseco http://www.roseco.com) and using the money to buy commercial grain. To get the fine grain, if you don’t care about exact percentage, you need a crucible with a narrow notch or hole so you can pour a thin molten stream into the water.
References :