Took 50 milligrams of the silvering powder plus a few drops of water, let it sit for a while to dissolve, and pipetted it onto a small copper disk to see what would do.

Basically nothing, a very slight darkening of the surface where some of the silver chloride granules were sitting but not much.

This recipe seems to rely on scrubbing/agitation to force the nearly insoluble silver chloride to react with the copper surface.

After aggressively rubbing a kimwipe over the surface with the silvering powder and water, I got this. Probably could have gone a bit longer to get better coverage, but it's a first attempt.

Next step will be to see what I can do with a lint-free swab or wooden stick to get in smaller spaces. One of the things I was afraid of with this formula was that it might not work well in tight spaces due to the process calling for rubbing (you can't just soak the surface)

The first formula I'm trying uses a 1:2:3 weight ratio of silver chloride, potassium bitartrate, and sodium chloride. I used 100, 200, 300 mg for a total of 600 mg in the mix.

The recipe calls for grinding in a mortar and pestle which i don't have yet (although one is on order) so I'll see what i can improvise in the meantime. Plenty of material for another few runs if needed without having to repeat the chloride synthesis.

538 milligrams, lol. Either I had an excess of silver nitrate somehow (weighing quantities this small in a fume hood with airflow is tricky) or it's not fully dry.

Anyway, plenty to run the next test.

The first washing had a kind of milky color to it and likely contains a bit more product that was really fine and didn't join the clumps. I saved all the washings and will see if anything settles out that might be worth trying to save in a second work-up pass later on.

But first step will be seeing what my dry yield on the filter paper is.

I expected a really fine milky clay like powder instead i got big goopy clumps. This looks a lot bigger than i thought 422 mg of a heavy metal compound would be especially considering how small the 500mg of silver nitrate was when I started. Maybe it'll shrink down when it dries?

Turned off all the lights including the fume hood (there's no vapor hazard here it's just my only bench space designated for wet chemistry) and will let it dry in darkness for a few hours on the filter paper, then scrape off into an amber glass vial and maybe pull vacuum for a bit to let it desiccate more completely so I can calculate yield. I think I got most but definitely saw some precipitate sticking to pipettes etc

Ok here's the setup. The gels were a little too small so there's light leakage at the back of the hood but not much, if i keep my work towards the front it should be OK.

If not, I'm only using 2% of my silver nitrate stock for this run so i can afford to try again.

Oh right, I should figure out solvent volumes too.

Silver nitrate has a solubility of 256 g/100ml at 25C so 500mg should dissolve fully in 195 μl of water.

Sodium chloride has a solubility of 360 g/l at 25C so 250 mg should dissolve fully in 70 μl of water.

I want to add a slight excess to ensure full dissolution, plus my lab is more like 22C or so. So I'm figuring maybe target 225 μl for the silver nitrate solution and 90 μl for the sodium chloride solution would be good to start.

My micropipette only goes to 100 μl and I don't need to be super exact so I'm thinking I'll just use a 1ml syringe, I get about 20 μl resolution on the tick marks which should be more than enough.