Our First Try At Making Homemade Silver Bars.

I'd buy all they had at $15/ozt....if I watched them make the bars and/or knew the guy making them well enough to know he wasn't cheating. Of course I'd immediately send them to my refiner for a quick profit.

Those look great! I tried a similar project using pure silver and ran into problems with the liquid silver absorbing oxygen from the air. When the ingot cools the oxygen bubbles out and creates large craters and voids in the final bar. This is characteristic of pure silver and I assume the sterling alloy doesn't do that. It also melts at a lower temp than the pure metal which makes the process easier to control.

Great project. I wonder how large a bar you can produce?

I use a commercial melter, 100oz size (they always refer to the gold capacity!) that will actually melt 50 oz of silver. You can get these cool little two-piece steel bar molds to pour into, some make a fixed size bar, others can be slid to vary the width of the bar. Here are some pics of me melting and pouring a 50 oz bar of .999 fine silver in preparation for rolling and punching blanks.

Note the use of the oxy-acetylene torch at the top of the mold. I was getting a really deep shinkage dimple in the tops of the bars and finally realized that if I were to pour more slowly, and keep the metal quite hot right at the lip, I could make the top of the bar come out almost completely flat. Also... it's important to use the oxy-acetylene with the oxygen turned off to carbonize the inside of the mold EVERY TIME... or else some silver will freeze to the inside of the mold during the pour and you get cold-shuts... which will fracture during rolling.

Tom Maringer
Shire Post Mint