I have access to a bunch of Cauterizing Silver Nitrate sticks for a song.These sticks contain up to 75% Silver nitrate and 25% Potassium nitrate. Is it possible to use these for Salt Printing processes?
Silver Nitrate (Cauterizing) Sticks
-
A
- Thread starter Blind
- Start date
Recent Classifieds
-
For Sale Aviphot 4x5, Techpan 120, 2x3 2422 films
- Started by MCB18
-
Want to Buy Voigtlander Perkeo w/ Color Skopar
- Started by aconbere
-
Sold Expired Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 - 120
- Started by Adam W
-
For Sale FS: 3x4 Pacemaker Speed Graphic Camera with 4x5 Cambo Back
- Started by B.S.Kumar
-
Sold Black Nikon fm2n
- Started by Gram Nylén
Forum statistics
My chemically educated guess is that a mixture of 75% silver nitrate and 25% potassium nitrate would work just fine for salt printing as long as you use 1.3 times more of the mixture compared to pure silver nitrate.
For example if you have a recipe that calls for 10g of silver nitrate use 13 g of the mixture. That way the amount of silver would be the same in your modified formula as it is in the original.
That said, and not knowing any of the details of your "deal", are you sure that this is worth the effort you will need to expend in order to recover the silver from the sticks?
From what I can see on Google these sticks look similar to matches. The amount of silver / potassium nitrate on the end of each stick is clearly small... maybe a couple of tenths of a gram? You will need to process (scrape the material off the stick?) a fair number of sticks to get a worthwhile amount.
The unknown will be the binder used to make the silver/potassium nitrate adhere to the end of the stick. The pure salts will certainly not adhere by themselves. The only way to determine if this will be a problem is to do the experiment.
Furthermore, if the binder is a significant portion of the mass of the material on the end of the stick, you will need to apply a larger "correction" factor than I suggest above. the factor of 1.3 I cited previously assumed that you only have the two nitrate salts without any other material present.
One last thought, if I had scraped material off the sticks, I would probably filter the solution I made from the scrapings in order to remove any insoluble material (e.g bit of wood) before trying to coat paper.
I hope this response is useful to you.
Regards,
For example if you have a recipe that calls for 10g of silver nitrate use 13 g of the mixture. That way the amount of silver would be the same in your modified formula as it is in the original.
That said, and not knowing any of the details of your "deal", are you sure that this is worth the effort you will need to expend in order to recover the silver from the sticks?
From what I can see on Google these sticks look similar to matches. The amount of silver / potassium nitrate on the end of each stick is clearly small... maybe a couple of tenths of a gram? You will need to process (scrape the material off the stick?) a fair number of sticks to get a worthwhile amount.
The unknown will be the binder used to make the silver/potassium nitrate adhere to the end of the stick. The pure salts will certainly not adhere by themselves. The only way to determine if this will be a problem is to do the experiment.
Furthermore, if the binder is a significant portion of the mass of the material on the end of the stick, you will need to apply a larger "correction" factor than I suggest above. the factor of 1.3 I cited previously assumed that you only have the two nitrate salts without any other material present.
One last thought, if I had scraped material off the sticks, I would probably filter the solution I made from the scrapings in order to remove any insoluble material (e.g bit of wood) before trying to coat paper.
I hope this response is useful to you.
Regards,
Sell those sticks for a dance on eBay and use the money to buy proper silver nitrate, would be my advice. Why make life more complicated, unnecessarily.
:Niranjan.
:Niranjan.
Thank you all for your words of wisdom. This is an Rx clear-out deal. For some reason hundreds of boxes of these silver sticks have become short-dated and they are about to get destroyed " safely " with special attention to heavy metal content. So, I could've picked them up for a song or two. But as I can see clearly now, the ratio of harvested Silver is not worth the work. On another forum somebody have suggested to build a " cathode + anode " style of silver recovery for this. Again it sounds too complicated for one time use. Oh well - I am glad I asked.
Well, it is something seemingly most Apuggers refrain from, for good reason.
But use some of them for their original intended use. They don’t really have an expiration date. And they work on small cuts and nicks.
I guess the easiest way to remove silver out of the sticks would be to put the tips in salt solution - silver chloride should precipitate which can be filtered and washed. If you want pure silver out of it, leave a suspension of it out in the Sun and you will get black silver particles.
An X-Ray lab owner/operator is willing to lend me his Silver recovery machine to extract the Silver. According to him if I exposed the stick to sunlight ( or strong halogen lamps ) for an hour or so and then drop the exposed sticks in adequate volumes of Fixer solution for a few hours, his machine would be able to recover 99.99% of Silver from the used up Fixer solution.
Yes, outdoors is always best. If anyone asks what you're doing, just say you're going to be having a sort of BBQ, and they'll probably leave you alone, thinking that they might swing by later on.
MattKing
Moderator
Not necessarily...see my silver nitrate games here: http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=82435
I think if you go with the concentration of the nitric acid a little bit higher e.g. 25-30% you can use 30% hydrogen peroxide see first posting in https://illumina-chemie.de/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=4710 (in German) and not the 50% hydrogen peroxide solution.
bj68
I made some lovely silver nitrate in my windowless darkroom, crystals are beautiful. I had a exhaust fan/vent hood. I used a cold finger reflux condenser I fashioned with a Pyrex custard dish filled with ice.
I boiled acid every weekday for 12 years, nitric acid and silver as noted produce incredibly toxic corrosive fumes. This is definitely in the don't try this at home unless you are mad, now retired, devil may care, chemist.
The silver nitrate sticks are useful for treating a minor wound, chemical cauterizing.
I boiled acid every weekday for 12 years, nitric acid and silver as noted produce incredibly toxic corrosive fumes. This is definitely in the don't try this at home unless you are mad, now retired, devil may care, chemist.
The silver nitrate sticks are useful for treating a minor wound, chemical cauterizing.
Yes....with maximum 3% nitric acid (see Anhang I in https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/DE/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019R1148&from=EN#d1e32-16-1 ) this way is now blocked....in the time where I was making this experiments there was the possibility that you can obtain 10% nitric acid legal as private person, but the german politician choose the other way see §10 AusgStG http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ausgstg/__10.html
As result of this bullshit I go now commercial.....because this fuc****ing ban from some ass***es of paper-pushers affects me in different ways e.g. etching metals http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/files.php?pid=652237&aid=85683 or using the recipes of this books: "Patina: 300 Surface Effects for Jewelers & Metalsmiths" and "The Colouring, Bronzing, and Patination of Metals: A Manual for the Fine Metalworker and Sculptor : Cast Bronze, Cast Brass, Copper and Copper-plate, Gilding Metal, Sheet Yellow Brass, Silver and Silver-plate"
bj68
| Photrio.com contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. To read our full affiliate disclosure statement please click Here. |
PHOTRIO PARTNERS EQUALLY FUNDING OUR COMMUNITY:  |