Kill two birds one stone

Those ends ya cut off of the AC unites are silver soldered on the one end, how to reclaim the silver and get pure copper.

With silver now at $25.00 a troy ounce its worth chasing, any old computer PSU will work as a power supply.

ELECTROLYTIC COPPER REFINING

Electrolytic copper can be produced from primary copper, secondary copper, or a combination of the two.

The primary type comes from copper ore and is brought to the stage of crude impure copper by various primary copper recovery methods—leaching, crushing, smelting, poling.

The secondary type comes from scrap wire, electronic scrap,cheap gold-filled jewelry, eyeglass frames, and so forth. The crude copper is mixed with secondary copper scrap and cast into huge anodes.

The mix is figured to give a cast anode of approximately 96% copper, the remainder being precious metals with traces of many other elements—such as zinc, nickel, and tellurium—depending upon
the source.

A great amount of today's primary gold recovery is from copper refining, where the gold values exist in the copper ore. The cells for electrolytic refining carry a great many anodes and cathodes and support a large-volume business.

However, a single anode and single cathode cell will serve to illustrate their operation. See Figure 7-1.

The crude copper is the anode, and a pure copper starting sheet is the cathode. The electrolyte is made by dissolving, in distilled water, copper sulphate (CuSOJ, a copper salt that is approximately 25% copper.

Some sulphuric acid is added as free acid to increase the conductivity of the bath.

A typical copper-refining acid bath, in miniature, would be: 250 grams per liter of copper sulphate, and 75 grams per liter of sulphuric acid; a bath operating temperature of 70° to 120°F; a voltage of 6 to 8 volts; and a current density in amperes of from 20 to 100 amperes per square foot of cathode surface.

Copper from the crude copper anode goes into solution and the positive ions of pure copper ( C u ) are carried over to the cathode by electromotive force through the electrolyte, where they are neutralized