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Do you ever come across old mirrors that are losing the shiny reflective stuff? On old mirrors that shiny stuff is SILVER!

I have two ready to scrap out. Anyone care to offer ideas on the best way to remove the SILVER from the glass????

Aren't old mirrors just a piece of glass with a silver coating on back? Would a razor blade scrap the coating off? You know, the kind of razor blade knife you use to scrap paint off windows.

Please let us know how it turns out. Time spent versus silver recovered.

I doubt the value of the silver would fairly compensate you for your efforts. You're talking a layer that is only one or two mil thick If you were lucky (ok, so I'm guessing here) I would think that there's less than one dollars worth of silver per mirror.

Sell them on ebay to other salvagers

I used to see someone posting on CL's wanted section they were looking for unused film rolls. I imagine they were looking to recover silver that way. Do old photographs have silver in them? I need to look that up. If they do and you find a non-ending source of them, you might have stumbled upon a silver mine.

JerrySpringer wrote:I used to see someone posting on CL's wanted section they were looking for unused film rolls. I imagine they were looking to recover silver that way. Do old photographs have silver in them? I need to look that up. If they do and you find a non-ending source of them, you might have stumbled upon a silver mine.

The film has them, but the silver content is miniscule.

Many modern mirrors don't use silver. And the ones that do have such a tiny amount it's not worth the cost to recover it.

Large mirrors with some damage to the edges are worth selling as is; buyers can have them cut down to a smaller size.

JerrySpringer wrote:I used to see someone posting on CL's wanted section they were looking for unused film rolls. I imagine they were looking to recover silver that way. Do old photographs have silver in them? I need to look that up. If they do and you find a non-ending source of them, you might have stumbled upon a silver mine.

Certain types of unused film sell for a premium to hobbyists and businesses, as a most of it is not being manufactured anymore.

Dr. Cadmium wrote:Certain types of unused film sell for a premium to hobbyists and businesses, as a most of it is not being manufactured anymore.

Doesn't it degrade over time eventually becoming useless? I seem to recall once using
some slightly past date film and getting poorer than normal pictures as a result.

I'm pretty sure for instance the last disc of Kodak disc film to roll off the assembly line
would be so far past expiry as to be useless by now for instance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXbDRRjG_BM

Some film such as xray film has a decent amount of silver in it.

gubni wrote: xray film has a decent amount of silver in it.

I have a buddy that sells chemicals to an outfit that recovers silver from the film....he has seen them use blocks of recovered silver as door stops

fasteddy wrote:

gubni wrote: xray film has a decent amount of silver in it.

I have a buddy that sells chemicals to an outfit that recovers silver from the film....he has seen them use blocks of recovered silver as door stops

One of these days I plan to build a wedge-shaped mold for silver door-stops. Dipped in rubber, it'd be pretty easy to hide a monster box in plain sight.

Engineer wrote:

fasteddy wrote:

gubni wrote: xray film has a decent amount of silver in it.

I have a buddy that sells chemicals to an outfit that recovers silver from the film....he has seen them use blocks of recovered silver as door stops

One of these days I plan to build a wedge-shaped mold for silver door-stops. Dipped in rubber, it'd be pretty easy to hide a monster box in plain sight.

On Auction Hunters, one of the characters claimed he found a huge silver bar amongst blocks of lead used by a shooting club that stored their gear in a storage locker.