The Fourth of July is the most patriotic of holidays, the day in which Americans celebrate the independence of the nation by purchasing tiny paper-and-gunpowder concoctions and igniting them to show the world what America is all about. Fireworks are made of more than just cheap paper and gunpowder, though, in fact, those silly little bang snaps that are seen as the only “safe” firework for children outside of sparklers actually contain a small bit of silver to make them work. That’s right, there is silver inside of snaps.
Cody of the Cody’s Lab YouTube channel was dead set on showing everyone just how much silver there was per snap and how to extract said silver. Now, if you were looking to perhaps save some money off of the rather inexpensive bang snaps by extracting the silver you probably won’t be in luck as he has actual equipment that isn’t found in most homes. But, if you have a crucible, furnace and the rest of the equipment featured in the video, then by all means, go to town and extract some metal from these bad boys.
He was actually surprised by how much silver he was able to extract, expecting .25 grams of silver but instead yielding 1.140 grams. That’s roughly fifty cents of silver from fifty dollars worth of snaps. The end result was a rather haphazard silver coin. No matter how you do the math on that one it really doesn’t make sense. So no, you won’t ever get rich out of extracting the silver out of bang snaps unless you somehow come into a tremendous supply of free bang snaps, but dreams like this are what America is all about.