Soldering Silver for Making Jewelry: Part 1

Video Transcript

"I'm D.J. Poye, professional jeweler and gemologist and I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village. Okay, now what we'll do is, I need to cut a few pieces of solder, this is Antimony solder, it doesn't have the copper in it. So it really, really is a bright solder. And there's lots of ways you can solder. You can with small clips that I really found this wire is really good. I've already cut three pieces here. I always have extra pieces in case I need them. But two is probably all you need. One of the final steps in order to make sure that you have all the lubricants on you, this is flux, which will be placed on both of the pieces and this flux is to help the solder move if you don't have the flux it just stays in one place. The flux helps the solder go into place. All right, next we're going to get the torch going and silver is a little bit different than gold, it takes a little bit more heat to heat things with silver. Sterling silver basically, flow point is about 1655 and 14 carats around 1625 so you do need to have the piece heated up a lot more. Gold just seems like it heats up evenly but with silver you have to constantly flow the heat to it constantly. So this is a pretty good piece, I'll have to make sure the whole entire piece is heated. Okay, make sure you have your safety glasses on. And here we go. Okay, what I'll do first is that the little veil, you always want to kind of go slow because the borax or the flux on both sides needs to adhere to the metal so as I move back and forth to make sure that the solder and the flux is like, you know, drying up. Both of the small pieces of solder are now at the end of the veil. Some people will put the solder on the larger piece first, flow it into place because usually the bigger piece always takes more heat, but sometimes they go different places. I kind of life to put them on a smaller piece and then just really watch what you do so that you don't burn the small piece up."