silver soldering
- Thread starter brybenn
- Start date
Curious - has anyone done silver plate? I have a sugar bowl (from a tea service) with the inevitable detached handle(s) and some other odds and ends (candle sticks) etc that I would like to resecure..... is there a way to keep the silver plate or sterling from "blooming" (if thats the correct term)...when silver soldering.
A little tip I picked up, user a lighter to put some soot on the area. When the temperature is right, the sit will burn of and your ready for solder. Haven't tried this on any gun parts yet, but it works great when silbrazing brass.
Do your homework first.
My money says that silver plate goods were not soldered together with the silver solder that you may be trying to use.
More like they used a lead-tin solder or a tin alloy solder and sweated the parts together before the parts were assembled. Like as not, the heat that would make a silver solder flow, is going to melt the parts and make a right mess of any solder traces that remain on the parts.
Cheers
Trev
I am betting you are right!! That is exactly why I was asking ... very likely would have to replate after. And with sterling .. I just dont know but would be concerned I might do some real damage!
Thanks VERY MUCH for the offer. I will do a little (lot) more reading and if you dont mind - then pm you with, what I hope, are relevant questions. Very kind of you.
(my mother was a gemologist years ago and recalled silver soldering small charms when she was apprenticing - but she informs me that so much has changed - even the spectrometers they employed to uncover synthetic gems are no longer of much use - )
the melting temperature of silver solder is 1150 - 1200 F and to get it to flow the work needs to be around 1400 F or a bit more. I doubt that you could get the work hot enough with a conventional propane torch --- maybe if you made a retort or small insulated chamber to enclose the work and keep the heat in. Biggest advice is that cleanliness is next to godlyness as the slightest amount of oil on the work and the solder will not flow. I use about 1 to 2 coils of silver solder per year and use an oxy propane cutting torch for my heat source
cheers mooncoon
cheers mooncoon
Mooncoon, I've done good silver soldering on small parts with a propane torch. But you're very much right that anything larger that requires more heat to be delivered over a larger area and volume is going to be very difficult. For something like silver soldering a front sight blade to a light barrel a propane torch would likely work. But it's also equally likely at the limit of what the basic torch can do. For a heavy target barrel or even a thicker and heavier sight base a regular propane torch would likely not be enough. You'd need one of the hotter "turbo torches" with the swirl tube or perhaps to use the hotter MAPP gas.
For anything larger you'd want to use an enclosed forge or a SERIOUS gas torch.
Some of the joints I've done involved laying bits of the solder onto the joint line set into a layer of the flux. The whole works is then heated until you see the bits of solder melt and wick into the joint. This works far better than trying to use the silver solder as a filler as it provides for a lot more control over the amount of solder used so you don't need to clean away any excess and risk damage to the metal.
We generally don't want to use so much solder in a silver soldering situation that we end up with large fillets. In fact we typically don't want fillets at all. What we DO need is a good tight fitting mechanical joint so you're not trying to fill large voids with the silver solder. The silver solder has excellent wicking properties so it will sweat into even fairly snug fitting mechanical joints and lock the parts solidly even with only a very small amount of solder.
And as always it pays to practice. But if you're going to practice anyway make it similar to what you want to do. It's pretty easy to make front sights that fit to a hunk of steel tubing or other situations from scrap steel so you're learning on something that is similar to your final goal.
For anything larger you'd want to use an enclosed forge or a SERIOUS gas torch.
Some of the joints I've done involved laying bits of the solder onto the joint line set into a layer of the flux. The whole works is then heated until you see the bits of solder melt and wick into the joint. This works far better than trying to use the silver solder as a filler as it provides for a lot more control over the amount of solder used so you don't need to clean away any excess and risk damage to the metal.
We generally don't want to use so much solder in a silver soldering situation that we end up with large fillets. In fact we typically don't want fillets at all. What we DO need is a good tight fitting mechanical joint so you're not trying to fill large voids with the silver solder. The silver solder has excellent wicking properties so it will sweat into even fairly snug fitting mechanical joints and lock the parts solidly even with only a very small amount of solder.
And as always it pays to practice. But if you're going to practice anyway make it similar to what you want to do. It's pretty easy to make front sights that fit to a hunk of steel tubing or other situations from scrap steel so you're learning on something that is similar to your final goal.
handofzeus
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