Pokemon Silver Made out of Pure Silver

by Kevin Videos
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Pokemon Gold was my  first Pokemon game and also my first GameBoy game for my Atomic Purple GameBoy Color. It will always be my favorite Pokemon game. Gold and Silver had some cool sparkle-y plastic, but what if we made them out of their actual material name. Well, making Pokemon Gold out of Gold isn’t feasible at the moment (so make sure to subscribe!), however, Pokemon Silver is attainable.

So, we bought a Sunshine 1 Kilo bar of .999 Silver. It cost $750 and spent another $50 to buy an authentic version of Pokemon Silver. I also wanted a nice way to display the silver bar, game, and GameBoy so we CNC turned a couple stands out of brass. For these three stands there was about $90 in brass.

I took apart a GameBoy cart and completely remodeled it. I even made the small standoff spots located in side. I change the self tapping plastic screw to a 2-56 Socket Head Screw. I also changed the Nintendo logo to “Modified” and the back says “Made in MN” rather than Japan. The bottom of the back has “.999 Pure Silver” engraved. Next, I 3D printed a sample and it fit perfectly!

Before taking the plunge and machining into the expensive silver, we first cut some aluminum stock to the same size as the silver bar and ran the program we’d be using for the silver. This was a fun cam program to make as the parts were machined out of the stock rather than doing each side. The front and back were done first and then flipped to do the inside followed by cutting out the pieces. It turned out great and fit, so we went on to doing the silver.

Now, many have asked or said we should cast it because it would be cheaper. While casting is cool, that would require buying a lot of equipment I do not have nor have any experience with. Furthermore, to make something like this I would have to machine a mold/die anyways along with machining the part after casting. It does not save any time or money, in fact it’s more for both instances. Casting is also quite porous and relatively weak. I do not think it would turn out well if at all compared to machining a professionally cast solid piece. The goal of the project wasn’t to be as cheap as possible an

We first tried machining without coolant, however, it got gummy and would easily gouge the material as seen in the video when trying to fly cut. Using some WD-40 kept it cool enough without having to pump coolant everywhere.

Silver scrap sells for nearly the same price as buying silver, so it was important to capture as much silver as possible. We built a box out of USPS Priority Box and some duct tape tp try to keep chips contained. After machining everything we lost about 1 oz of silver. The two cartridge pieces weighed 5.8 oz (not troy oz). The rest was sold for a little over $500. The cartridge has about $160 in silver.

The heftiness of it is intense. It’s over 10 times heavier than the standard cart. It’s shiny and beautiful. Definitely one of the coolest Pokemon Silver games out there. Please check out the video to see it, and subscribe if you haven’t already!