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Silver

     Silver has always fascinated me. The metal has many strange and beautiful properties and is a pleasure to work with on the wet bench. The following are some of my researches into the morphology of silver deposits. NewC listmember Nick Reiter has been kind enough to furnish some time on the electron microscope for a closer look at some of the silver structures presented here.

     While one can buy the CP grade silver nitrate, it's easy and cheap to make a large quantity of technical grade with scrap silver and nitric acid. Chop up the silver into small chunks, and heat it gently in a Pyrex beaker filled with enough nitric acid and water to cover the metal. Do this in a fume hood or outside where there is sufficient ventilation. Filter the cold solution to remove the unreacted material. Warm it to drive off water and saturate the solution. The silver nitrate will crystallize out on when the hot solution is cooled. Pour off the mother liquor (use it with more acid to dissolve silver at a later date) and wash the crystals. A purer product can be produced by recrystallizing from water. The crystals are snow white and odorless.

     I have observed a strange thing dissolving silver in nitric acid. When using an old silver ashtray as source material, I noticed an unusual blue plasma-like discharge at the cut tips of the metal. The phenomena persisted until the metal was consumed. Perhaps an alloying metal in the silver was responsible, as I hadn't noticed the effect with pure silver (yet). Can the produced hydrogen burn without explosion?

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