Home made black copper oxide from silver and gold scrap refining.

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:01]Thought some of you out there might find this interesting. Got a little bit of um copper in solution scrap. This actually looks green in person, but my camera is making it look blue for some reason. Um so I've been refining silver and gold.

[00:00:13]That's a bunch of silver there. And you know, I really just didn't want to cement out the the copper on steel or whatever. I wanted to use it for other things. So, I got some baking soda and water here.

[00:00:27]Some sodium bicarbonate, right? And water. And we're making an insoluble solution here of copper carbonate.

[00:00:40]Pretty cool, huh? So, you take that and you filter it out. Well, it's hard to filter because how fine it is, but it'll remove all the copper. Um, and what you do is you you decant it repeatedly gently once it settles with fresh water um just to to rinse that.

[00:00:59]And then what you you end up with is some nice fairly pure uh copper carbonate. And you take this and you heat it and it'll turn to black copper oxide which can be used to make thermites and other um fireworks, things like crackle stars and stuff like that.

[00:01:18]And we'll be showing that in a minute.

[00:01:20]here. I figured I would do this to kind of lighten the atmosphere, you know, with the whole Dugan thing going on and everything. If you haven't seen that one, please go watch my last video. Um, donate if you can. He really could use it. All right, so we'll move on to the next step.

[00:01:36]This can be done with a regular propane torch.

[00:01:40]I've done small amounts this way. Um, you got to heat it till it turns black.

[00:01:44]I got a graphite rod there to stir it with. You got to be careful. in a very well ventilated area. This is uh it may have a little bit of nitrate in it which will give you some NO2 gas. So you don't want to breathe this but basically you want to heat it until it all turns black until you see that you really don't want to breathe it.

[00:02:15]So there is some nitrate left in it. I prefer to use heat. You can do it chemically.

[00:02:22]I personally don't like doing it chemically. Save the reent.

[00:02:28]Yeah, I should be doing this in here.

[00:02:37]A lot of my conversion wasn't that great.

[00:02:49]takes it takes quite a minute to actually get it all to convert.

[00:02:55]Actually, set that down.

[00:03:00]That way I can get the leaf up a little bit more. Put a little torch right to it.

[00:03:10]Get it hot. I forget the actual temperature. You can look it up online.

[00:03:16]This is just something to kill time for fun.

[00:03:21]Lighten up the whole mood with everything going on right now. You can use this stuff to make crackle stars and all kinds of stuff.

[00:03:30]You can use it to make the copper thermite which is uh very very very energetic.

[00:03:44]Using a stainless steel uh sauce container from a restaurant here.

[00:03:54]You want the air to get to it. And you don't really want to do it. You can do it in a test tube, but you really don't want to because um if there's any moisture in it, it'll start coming up the sides of the test tube and then um recondensing and then rolling back to the bottom. You could also break the test tube from the moisture and so on.

[00:04:30]Starting to turn pretty black. It takes a while though to get it all the way to the center.

[00:04:41]Pretty darn black already.

[00:04:54]damaging my rod.

[00:04:58]Apart from the acids and the left over in it.

[00:05:09]And again, don't breathe the nitrogen dioxide or any lithiums.

[00:05:14]And this is, you know, it's just a byproduct of, you know, refining silver and gold, you get that copper, you know, when you when you uh either dissolve it off the computer chips or whatever, or or if you're cementing out the silver on the copper, you end up with the copper in solution. If you if you were taking other um you know like poor crappy silver and you're refining it to make it more pure.

[00:05:43]This was from a little bit of gold and silver refining I did. Look at that nitrogen dioxide.

[00:05:56]It's starting to convert.

[00:06:00]You see it's still got some blue left in it.

[00:06:04]Little bit of green.

[00:06:08]This might actually be a better way of doing it cuz I can get the air in it. You want the air to get into it.

[00:06:20]Yeah, that I just lost some. That seems to be working a lot better though.

[00:06:24]Oh, that is fluffy.

[00:06:27]Look at that nitrogen dioxide.

[00:06:31]The more oxygen it gets to it at temperature, the quicker it'll convert.

[00:06:43]That's a lot of nitrogen dioxide.

[00:06:47]Could even be maybe some fine copper particle, but I kind of doubt that. It's possible, though.

[00:06:53]And look at that. It is all jet black now.

[00:06:59]So, we're good for the next step. Mix this up with a little teeny bit of aluminum. We're going to go 2 to1 aluminum powder and see how reactive it is.

[00:07:13]Okay, so we have some really fine aluminum here.

[00:07:18]And here's our product.

[00:07:21]Looks really nice. Of course, I did dump some on the ground by accident.

[00:07:32]See what we got for weight here.

[00:07:36]This stuff is so light and fluffy.

[00:07:39]The commercial stuff um feels a lot more dense.

[00:07:46]So, we'll go we'll go four grams of that.

[00:07:57]could have extra carbon in it, you know, from other byproducts.

[00:08:01]That may be another reason why it's so darn fluffy. Let me just uh I'm going to set the phone down for a second here just to wipe the just to wipe this off cuz I don't want crosscontamination.

[00:08:13]So, now we're going to go with some aluminum. I'm going to go all the way up to six grams.

[00:08:22]Jesus stuff here is really really fluffy and kind of clumpy.

[00:08:39]All right, so we got 6.06.

[00:08:44]I probably should have had somebody helping me do this. I'm going to set the this back down so that I can stir and mix.

[00:08:54]Normally, I would have a camera guy for this or I would just mount my GoPro, but kind of lazy. I don't feel like doing that today.

[00:09:04]Okay, so here we go.

[00:09:07]Here's our copper thermite. You got to remember copper thermite is no joke. It will if it's confined it will detonate. Um it's pretty crazy powerful stuff. I'm just going to use a blowtorrch to set it off.

[00:09:25]Probably shouldn't be that close to it.

[00:09:27]When this stuff burns, it's going to make really fine metallic copper in the air. So you don't want to breathe it.

[00:09:33]It's going to be extremely bright.

[00:09:41]Woo! There it goes. That was pretty impressive. And of course, it lit right on fire cuz it's hot.

[00:09:50]Yep. You see the metallic copper all the way around the edge of where it burned.

[00:09:54]So, yeah, that stuff works really, really well. So, if you can't get your hands on copper oxide, but you happen to be refining gold and silver or have uh copper nitrate, but you'd like to convert it, that's pretty much how you do it. Well, thanks for watching.