Recovering Silver From Old Refirgerators

Incredible Scale! Pure Silver Extraction Process from AC Motor Compressors | How it's Made Recycling
Asian Skills Media

This must be a hobby for these guys. With all the fuel, oxygen and acid they use for the small amount of silver they recover, I can't see how they are making any money.

Compare to the modern American method of recycling refrigerators. The Americans might recover some metal, but I suspect they make their money from the charges they impose to dispose of the refrigerators.

The Rise and Fall of US Steel

How Stubbornness Killed US Steel
The Hustle

I like the graphs that show the evolution of steel making technology. Also interesting: the sheet metal is the most profitable steel product. Guess I shouldn't be surprised since that's what cars are made of. Used to be body panels but now it's the unibody structures since there is so much plastic on the outside.

P. S. Could you have a more attractive and wholesome video host? 

Treasure

Lightbox Diamond Factory, Gresham, Oregon

At lunch today, Iowa man tells us he has discovered a diamond factory in Gresham, just east of Portland. There is a story in Oregon Live from a few years ago. Who'd a thunk it? (Previous posts about Diamonds.)

I mentioned this video I came across recently. Jack thinks the Federal Reserve Bank in New York's gold bullion hoard is worth more. Let's see:

Gold on hand	6,331	tons
times	2,000	pounds per ton
times	12	ounces per pound
times	2,600	dollars per ounce
equals	395,054,400,000	dollars

Jack is right, 400 billion is more than 10 billion. Of course this depends on the Federal Reserve telling us the truth about how much gold they have and I am not sure I trust them any more than I trust the Federal Government.

In the Netflix series Black Sails, the pirates recover many tons of gold from a wrecked Spanish treasure ship. Gold is heavy, so they convert a portion of it to gemstones which evidently have a higher value to density ration. This seems to like a risky proposition to me. Gold can easily be measured, gemstones need an appraiser both when you buy them and again when you sell them, which means you are at their mercy, that is, if you can even find one. A couple of pounds of gemstones could be worth as much as a ton of gold, so if portability is an issue, then the risk entailed might be worth it. Gemstones have no particular attraction for me. Oh, they are pretty enough, but not they are not pretty enough that I am going to spend a pile of loot to acquire one just so I can look at it. If one did fall into my hands I would probably hang onto it because it is more likely to hold onto its value than anything else. Some people like to have them so they can show them off. I am not one of those people. My wife has to remind me to shave when we are going out.

Jack's sister recently sold a pile of silver coins she inherited from her father. A lump of silver the size of a pack of cigarettes is worth about $1,400. The coin man used the ping test on her coins.

Ping Test for Silver Coins & Bars
SilverCoins.com

Ping test is a good thing to have in your pocket if you are dealing in silver. There are any number of videos talking about the ping test and they are a real grab bag. First problem is that the ping test is not definitive. The second is it can be very hard to tell the difference between a real coin and a fake, especially if you don't have anything to compare it to. Third is that some real coins will fail the test. I picked this one because it's not too long and he just balances the coins on his finger.

Update the next day: changed ounces per pound from 16 to 12 per Stu's comment.

Mechanical Meditation

California Bob found this quite fun:
Car Dismantler Powerhand VRS (Vehicle Recycling System)
Powerhand

Powerhand is based in Scotland.

Uniberp replies with a link to a TikTok video:

This guy gets metal the old fashioned way, he chops up electronics with an ax.

Sometimes he does a live stream, which I have found mesmerizing for a few minutes until I start to feel vicarious exhaustion and hopelessness.

I enjoyed watching these guys digging a road in Turkey:

Caterpillar D7g Bulldozer And Excavator Removes Giant Block Rock~Dev Kaya Çıkartma Operasyonu
GREYDER MEHMET
These guys are pulling a bulldozer out of the mud.
Amazing Expertly Technique Skills SHANTUI BULLDOZER Falling Into The Water Help Heavy Crean Success
Construction Cambodia
I am amazed by how thin those cables are. They don't look to be more than 3/4 of an inch thick and they are lifting that multi-ton bulldozer. It is Cambodia, so maybe they are working a little closer to the edge. Shoot, we probably have guys here doing the same kind of sketchy looking things. A 30 ton load will break a 3/4" steel cable. This bulldozer, a Shantui DH17, weighs about 9 tons, so they should be okay. A 3 to 1 ration is not the normal safety factor of 10 to 1, but at least they are not on the hairy edge.

Micrograph

Metal Micrograph

The Thermal Spray Guy has a couple of Struers Abramin Polishers for sale. Okay, but what is a Struers Abramin and why do you want to polish it? Struers is the company and they make equipment for examining the microscopic structure of metals. Found the above image on their website. I suspect the actual size of the section shown is about .005" (five thousandths of an inch).

Preparation of a sample for examination takes several steps of grinding and polishing with ever finer grit. They end with grit with a particle size of 500 nanometers. A line drawn on the above sample would hold one hundred thousand of such particles.

Struers has bunch of videos posted on YouTube.

Russian Metal

Explaining Commodities (Scene)

Mish Talk headline: Citigroup Takes Delivery Of 100,000 Tons Of Aluminum And 40,000 Tons Of Zinc

When you are speculating on commodities (like coffee, tea, or aluminum, or orange juice like in Trading Places) the idea is unload your purchase onto someone who actually wants it rather than to take possession of it, because then you would need some place to put it. Evidently Citigroup has leased some warehouse space in Taiwan to store these ingots, so they are jumping in with both feet. Okay, that's fine by me. I ain't playing on the London Metals Exchange.

But then we have this line from Mish:

Much if not most of these metals are of Russia origin. But that’s OK because the Biden administration placed no bans on Russian aluminum or zinc.

So evidently Russia is not the devil incarnate, they are only bad if they sell cheap gas and oil to Europe.

Steel

The refractory properties of rhenium make it indispensible for aeronautical tech

Whipped Cream Difficulties has a post up about battleship steel. pigpen51 comments:

I made steel for a living, for over 35 years. And have to wonder if the steel that we made, especially from virgin material, was low background. Since all of the materials would have been mined from underground, it should have been shielded from radioactive fallout.

We actually had to check the radiation level of some virgin materials coming in from certain parts of the world. Mostly things like Tellurium, Hafnium, and other rare elements that we used in making super alloys for jet engines. We used a Geiger Counter to check the metal before letting it come into the plant. And we also kept some of them locked in a safe, like Rhenium, due to both the possibility of contamination but also the extreme cost.

I melted heats of 8,000 lbs. that were worth 10 million dollars, due to the amount of both Rhenium and the expertise to melt the heat in the correct way, under high vacuum conditions. This alloy in particular was used in the hot section of jet engines. It kept it’s strength very close to it’s melting point, and the hotter the engine could run, the more efficient it would be.

He mentions my old friend Rhenium. Huh.

Melting Point

Photo by yasin hm on Unsplash

Cyn's Shadowland has a few words to saw about her personal melting point. Meanwhile, steel melts at 2,500 degrees Farenheit.

Nickel

London Metals Exchange Building
It's the one with the wavy front and the oval-ish top floor

Bayou Renaissance Man reports on the fallout from the London Metals Exchange disaster that happened earlier this year. It's an entertaining story.

Turns out the London Metals Exchange is actually in London, not Hong Kong. It is owned by some outfit in Hong Kong which is where my confusion originated. The field in back of the building belongs to the Honorable Artillery Company and was originally used for archery. Now it is also used for cricket.

Dudinka - Norilsk

Norilsk, Russia

A big Chinese nickel producer got caught in a short squeeze that severely disrupted the London Metals Exchange (otherwise known as LME) which, for some reason, is based in Hong Kong. They were trying to make some money by gambling, a time honored tradition amongst gamblers and financial whiz kids. They were betting that the price of nickel was going to drop, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, the US threw up a bunch of sanctions and the price of nickel skyrocketed because, don't you know, Russia is one of the biggest producers of nickel in the world.

Nornickel's Bystrinsky Mine and Concentrator

Rising prices are very bad for someone who is betting that the price is going down, especially when the time for settling the bet is coming due, so they tried to buy up a bunch of nickel to cover their bets, which drove the price up even higher and eventually the London Metals Exchange said this is crazy and shut down all nickel trading. It looks like the Chinese producer is going to be out $8 billion which is no small amount, even for a Chinese oligarch.

Norilsk - Dudinka Railway

Norilsk is the site of Russia's biggest nickel mining and smelting operation. It is pretty well landlocked, so their product is shipped to 50 miles to Dudinka where it is loaded onto ships on the Yenisei River.

Arctic Express loading at Dudinka, Russia

Dudinka is 1.5 degrees north of the Arctic Circle, so the Yenisei River is a river of ice, which makes shipping a challenge, to put it mildly.

Liebherr crane unloads the massive heat exchanger from the ship in Dudinka Seaport

Marine Traffic near Norilsk, Russia

All those colored dots on this map are big ships. Norilsk is near the right hand edge of the map and the green dot about a half of an inch to the left is at Dudinka. Left of center in the image is another river of ice but it has quite a bit more traffic. I wonder what they are doing over there. I imagine more resource extraction, but that's going to have to wait for another time.

MV Federal Yamaska Bulk Carrier
198 piece jigsaw puzzle

I did this puzzle a couple of days ago and I wondered where the photo was taken. Didn't find anything, I suspect it's in Alaska, but who knows. I'm tacking it on here just because it seems to fit.

Titanium Crowbar

$80 Solid Titanium Crowbar From Russia
Cool Tools

I'm not usually big on promotional videos, but this one brings an interesting slant to the topic. Remember that back during the cold war we bought the titanium we used to build the SR-71 from Russia, though I think was through some CIA cutouts. Now we can get it via Ebay.

Argentium

Custom Toyota Supra Engine

All I need is a little paint and polish to satisfy my craving for fancy machinery, but for some people that is not enough. Apparently these engraved pieces are real gold and silver. The silver might be Argentium which is a special alloy that employs Germanium. Sterling silver is typically an alloy containing about 7% copper. The copper gives it strength, but it can also cause discoloration when the metal is heated. Argentium solves that problem.


Argentium is Firescale Free
This is all new to me. I've only heard of germanium being used in high-performance transistors and solar cells. High-performance usually means more expensive because if it was just as cheap as regular performance no one would use the lower performance product, every one would use the high-performance version and we wouldn't call it 'high-performance'. So germanium must be at least semi-rare, or difficult to mine. Just over 100 tons is produced annually, which is pretty small potatoes when you compare it to things like aluminum (59 million tons) and steel (1.7 billion tons).

Germanium is produced as a by-product of zinc mining. Zinc is mined all over the world. Ivanhoe Mines has resurrected an old mine in the Congo that promises to be a good producer.


Kipushi Project
So even though there are a number of shitheads running around making trouble, capitalization marches on, and as long as they are providing decent jobs, they are the good guys.

Update the next morning. I got to thinking that Periodic Videos probably had a video about germanium. They do, but he doesn't tell you much other than it is opaque to visible light but transparent to infrared light.

Pic of the Day

Metal blocks fresh out of the heat treating furnace

Shiny

Ladies Wristwatch

I took my wife's wristwatch in to get the battery replaced today. The counterman notes that it is a good looking watch. Well, yes, it's gold and it's shiny, so yeah, sort of. But it's costume jewelry, it's not solid gold, it probably cost about a hundred dollars. But I've never seen this watch before (okay, I've probably seen it, but hadn't noticed it). How could I tell at a glance that it was gold plated and not solid gold? (Disregard the fact that solid gold watches are not in our budget.)

I don't know, but I have a theory. Most metals are harder than gold, so whatever it is made of can be polished to a much higher degree, to the point that it is really shiny. When they plate it, the gold simply carries on that really shiny surface. Working with solid gold, you can't polish it that fine, you'll just wear away the gold, so you can't make it as shiny.

Refrigerator

My custom refrigerator dust getter. Made by taping a short piece of aquarium tubing to the end of a standard vacuum cleaner crevice tool. I used electrical tape to connect the two.

Our 25 year old refrigerator has given up the ghost. It's been leaking water, off and on, little drips and drabs for a month now. And a couple of weeks ago the freezer quit freezing. Yesterday I finally got a round toit and cleaned out the dust from the evaporator coils on the under side of the fridge. It was bad, I hadn't bothered to give it a thorough cleaning since we bought it. How can you tell anyway? Everything is painted black, and it's dark underneath there. I spent a couple of hours vacuuming, blowing dust with the air compressor, mopping up the mess the compressed air made and then doing it all over again. I even made a special tool to get through the outer grill of wires and tubes. I got a heck of a lot of dust out of there, and spread dust all over the downstairs. Put it back together, plugged it in and let it run for 12 hours. I felt for sure that getting the dust out would cure it, but such was not the case.

Our new fridge, a Frigidaire Gallery 22.6 Cu. Ft. French Door Counter-Depth Refrigerator DGHF2360PF

It used to be that in a such a case I would redouble my efforts until I had completely disassembled the fridge and rebuilt it to my exacting standards. Only then, when it still failed to freeze would I have  considered throwing in the towel. Maybe I have gained a little wisdom is my old age, or maybe I have just learned to listen to my wife, or maybe that is the same thing.

So we went to Hutchins TV & Appliance this afternoon and bought a new one. I find appliance stores are good for us because they have salesmen on hand who are willing to talk about their products. I don't care much for such conversations, I prefer a spreadsheet with the facts, but my wife is more verbal and she likes to talk about these things, and salesmen are perfectly happy to do that. Besides her concerns are different than mine. For example, at first she wanted black stainless steel, but defiant daughter talked her out that, for which I am glad. I suspect this 'black stainless' is fad that will last a couple of years until some really ugly examples start showing up. Might not be anything wrong with the finish, but it is new, and special, not 'standard', and therefor suspect.

Interesting thing about stainless refrigerators: stainless steel is not magnetic, so your cute little refrigerator magnets will not stick to the refrigerator door as they have been doing since time immemorial. Horrors! This cannot be! Well it is, and it isn't. Different manufacturers have taken different approaches to the problem. Frigidaire has backed their stainless steel skins with a sheet of regular steel, so the magnets still stick. Whirlpool (or is it GE?) concocted a special blend of stainless steel that is magnetic, so the magnets still stick. GE (or is it Whirlpool?) said phooey on this whole magnet business, we are the future after all, and integrated a touch screen into the door.

Poking around for an explanation, I found this:

Austenitic stainless steels (such as a typical 300 series) are non-magnetic, whereas martensitic stainless steels (such as a typical 400 series) are magnetic. - Brian Barnhart

Rumor has it that when consumer appliances with stainless steel skins first started to appear, they were prone to smudging, but now we have smudge resistant finishes. I wonder just what the heck they are doing to make them smudge resistant, and how thick is the stainless steel skin on Frigidaire refrigerator? I suspect it may be only a few thousandths of an inch thick, kind of like aluminum foil.

There is also a problem with ice dispensers in these 'portal' refrigerators. The top portion of the refrigerator is refrigerated, not frozen, but the ice dispenser is up there as well. How do you deal with this? You install a minature freezer inside the fridge. Some companies put them in the door, which limits their ice capacity. In our fridge, the ice maker and ice storage are in a box hanging from the inside top.

Five Cent Deposit

Nuka Cola Vending Machine from the Fallout video game.
No link because their webpage ate my computer.

Oregon has a bottle deposit law that requires a nickel deposit on almost all bottled drinks. When we were younger and more tightly wound, we would diligently save all of our beer bottles and carry them to the grocery store to get our deposit refunded. A month's worth of beer bottles worked out to almost $5! Woo hoo!

A few years ago I quit participating in this waste of time, but my wife, always concerned about money, persisted. Then one day last summer we are out running some errands together, and one of her errands is to return the cans and bottles rattling around in the back of her car. Now it used to be, when Hank's was still in business, you could count up your cans and bottles, take them to Hank's, tell the bottle boy how many you had and he would write you a ticket you could take to the cashier. He was happy because he didn't have to count the bottles, and I was happy because I didn't have to wait for him to count the bottles. It was one of those all-too-rare win-win situations. But Hank's has gone out of business and now if you want to get your deposit back you have to deal with one of those Robocop anti-vending machines.

So we're driving around and we stop at a grocery store (Freddie's or Safeway, makes no difference, they both work the same way), but half the machines are broken and there are a bunch of people using the ones that aren't. We stop at two more stores, got the anti-vending machine to take some of our cans and bottles, and gave away the rest. We spent like two hours on this debacle and cleared like $2. Never again, I said.

So now I dump a couple of dollars worth of cans and bottles in the recycling bins ever two weeks. Rumor has it that there was a guy coming around before the trash trucks and scarfing up all the returnables, but then one of our idiot neighbors complained (why? and to who?), and that doesn't happen anymore. Of course, it could be that our phantom bottle collector decided it wasn't worth his time or gasoline to pursue this. I mean, the grocery stores have some kind of ridiculously low daily limit like $5 or $10 on the amount you can collect each day, which means you would need to visit a dozen stores every day in order to make enough money to survive, and you would probably burn $20 worth of gas to get to all those stores.

Rumor has it that the state is going to raise the bottle deposit to ten cents, but until they get some kind of efficient system in place for refunding those deposits, trying to collect those deposits is going to be a thankless task. But as long as there are enough people who have nothing better to do with their time than to pick up trash, and who value their time down in the pennies-per-hour range, then the cans and bottles alongside the road will continue to get picked up.

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We reorganized our kitchen cupboards over the holiday. Most of our pots and pans were looking pretty raggedy. They all had some kind of non-stick coating that was badly worn. There is a rumor floating about that Teflon is bad for the environment, though we aren't really sure if it's causing any damage, after all it is almost completely chemically inert, but microscopic traces of the stuff are showing up everywhere. So the pans are ugly, and there might be some vague problem with using Teflon coated pans for cooking, so we go looking for some new ceramic coated ones. Costco delivers a set for a hundred bucks, or was it $60? I forget. In any case we have new ones and the only thing to do with the old ones is to dump them in the recycling bin. I mean, if they aren't good enough for us, is it really fair to expect that anyone else would want them? Would Goodwill even accept them?

This is like a cardinal sin. The pans are still perfectly good, and if we were worried about the non-stick coating, I could have ground or burned it off. Of course that is going to send more Teflon into the environment and I would have a bunch of pans that would have to be scrubbed each time they were used.

And dumping them into the recycling should be an acceptable solution. I mean we recycle our aluminum soda cans after just one use. Pans are more durable, in the good old days, they should have lasted forever. But times have changed. How much time do you want to spend scrubbing pots and pans? Me, I scrubbed one once and I didn't mind it, but I can see that doing it on regular basis could get old.

Hammer & Tongs

Visit China Factory for flange .forging ,ring in dingxiang -Shanxi Liyang Forging Co.,ltd
Original caption: Crazy Chinese smiths. Forge a large flange on the street
Shanxi Liyang Forging LY
Best example of hammer and tongs I have seen. Not familiar with that expression? The Free Dictionary explains:

go at it hammer and tongs

To do something or perform some task with tremendous fervor, determination, energy, or forcefulness. An allusion to the force with which a blacksmith strikes metal using his or her hammer and tongs. What started as a minor disagreement has escalated into a heated argument, and the two have been going at it hammer and tongs ever since 

Update December 2017 replaced missing video, reformatted quote.
Update October 2018 replaced missing video, kept old caption.

Update September 2024 replaced missing video.

Return of the Jetsons

Arconic Jetsons Kathrin Jassmann
I used to watch The Jetsons, when? A million years ago? It was kind of a dumb show, along the lines of All In The Family, or Married... with Children, but the gee-whiz gadgets were kind of cool.

This video comes from Arconic, an aluminum manfucturing company. They are a spin-off of Alcoa. Where Alcoa is concerned with mining and smelting, Arconic is more into producing finished aluminum parts. To that end they have just installed a new stretching machine in their plant in Davenport, Iowa. Stretching straightens the sheet and relieves stress. Like friction-stir welding, it is unique to aluminum processing. It isn't used with steel.

Arconic also has a plant in Indiana where they produce aluminum-lithium alloy. I had never heard of aluminum being alloyed with lithium before, but that's not saying much. I hadn't heard of aluminum-copper alloys until recently, and they've been in use for a hundred years.

Update May 2019 replaced missing video.

Update December 2022 replaced missing video.

Land Locked Boat Builder

Uniberp got me started with a video about building a steel hulled sailboat. These videos are a little longer than my usual fare. They run 11, 14 and 9 minutes. I enjoyed them thoroughly.


Sandblast Profile Comparator
They start out with technical discussion of surface preparation but then wander off into all kinds of various metal working, which got me to wondering just who are these guys? Which lead to this:


DIY Boat Propeller - Part 5 - The Success

Casting is one of those things that kind of gets glossed over whenever people are talking about machinery. Conceptually simple, you just pour molten metal into a mold, let it cool, and presto, there's your part. In practice there are a whole lot of details that have to be dealt with. I am sure that somewhere else in their series of videos they explain where the pattern comes from.

This boat is under construction in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places. How are you going to get it to the ocean? I mean it is obviously a deep water boat. Turns out Tulsa has a port. (No way, dude!) No ocean going ships, but plenty of barge traffic, and the waterway connects to the Mississippi and so to the Gulf of Mexico and all the oceans of the world.


Tulsa Port of Catoosa

Continental USA Inland Waterways

The Eastern USA is riddled with navigable waterways. The West Coast, no so much. I could not find a good map. This one is small and blurry. All the others either included some commercial distortion or were missing pieces. This one at least includes all the important parts.

Gnomes at Work

FORGED - shot on RED Weapon 8K
Very cool video. Very calming. All my favorite activities entrained in the production of an antique weapon. Tune is Technically, Missing by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I've heard that video is trying to move to 4K and now it looks like some people are experimenting with 8K, not that you or I or anyone outside of video lab would have a screen that could produce an 8K image. I suppose fiber could deliver it if you had a machine that could swallow it.