Silver Maintainance
I sun my silver in an open jar and leave it in bright sun for a couple of days every month or so. I haven't been able to do that since the first of last November. It's cold and often dark here, and I don't have a good place to mess with it indoors. I do continue to shoot wet plate outdoors until the daily highs can't get above 20 F. So, my silver hasn't been sunned or filtered in about half a year.

I finally got around to it this week. Poured it into my big glass jar, covered with fine mesh, put a piece of shiny foil behind it, and kept it in the direct sun for a bit over two days. It did get murky! Tonight I filtered it three times with a coffee filter but it still looked a bit gray so I filtered it twice with cotton balls. That seemed to pick up the fine particles and cleared it nicely. It no longer smells like alcohol either. I decided to check the SG and it was 1.05! I've simply been adding distilled water to bring up the volume all winter. It took a lot of silver nitrate to bring it back up! (8x10 Lund tank.) I was surprised the tins were looking pretty good but they were starting to get spots on them. Upshot is I have fresh collodion, developer, fixer, and now nicely cleaned silver to work with this weekend.🙂 In the past I only filtered the silver two or three times with a coffee filter and will continue to do that, but now I'm also running it through a couple of cotton balls. I was pretty impressed with what those pulled out.


Kent in SD