Re: [ATM] Silvering Woes

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

Not sure why you didn't get the colloidal silver deposit that forms the
nice shiny coating.  Can make one suggestion for (long ago) personal
experience, coupled with a bit of basic organic chemistry.  The business
of preparing invert sugar by boiling with acid is a holdover from the
days when chemicals were harder to come by.  Now, it is easier, and will
give more repeatable results to use glucose instead of sucrose.  Glucose
is now readily available.  The point to boiling sucrose in an acid
solution is that sucrose is a dimer (compound) of fructose and glucose.
 Sucrose won't, in it's native state, reduce silver.  The boiling in
acid bit hydrolyzes sucrose back into fructose and glucose.  Glucose
will reduce silver (and maybe fructose too).  Since you can buy pure
glucose easily now, might as well skip the cooking.

-- 
Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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