Where is the best places to buy Alloy 22k 18K and plumb solder for Fabrication and Rolling.
Or do you have a formula to make your own.
Thanks,
Cliff
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I am not sure about the best place, it depends on what you need and how fast. The prices do vary a bit, but not much. Try Hoover and Strong, Rio Grand and Stuller. There are many more places to buy precious metal, but these are the places that I buy from. 18 K should not be a problem, but 22 K may be. Good luck…Rob
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Sorry that I couldn’t help you more. Let’s see if anyone else has any ideas…Rob
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My dad started doing business with Hoover and Strong in the 1950s, they have been and are still in business. I started with Hoover and Rio Grand in the early 1970s, they have been and are still in business. Stuller has been in business since who knows when, they are still in business. This is true of many other reputable companies that we do business with. They all value their stock at spot, add whatever is needed for additional alloying material, shop labor, indirect cost, transportation and some profit so that they can stay in business, and that is what they sell for. I buy a gram of silver from any of them that costs me $1.25 after transportation, turn it into a bracelet and sell that same gram of silver for $8.50 to cover my cost, labor and profit. I am not sure what point you are making. If you want a reliable source of precious metal, this is what you have to pay. Yes, you may find a deal today that is gone tomorrow and what good is that unless you want to spend more time looking for another deal than making and selling jewelry…Rob
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Ross metals in NYC. They have a website and ship I believe
Thank you,
Cliff
I have a Ross Metals account. I compared 10 feet of 10 gauge sterling silver round wire online at Ross to Rio and Stuller. Ross was $162, Rio was $139 Stuller was $148. Hoover and Strong does not offer 10 gauge, so I left it out of the comparison.
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The jewelry artist and owner of Jewelry Arts Inc., Jeanette Caines, sells gold solder in 14K, 18K, 20K, and 22K in various gold colors. She also has a new fusible 22K gold alloy in sheet and wire. She is a gold expert and she is very happy with these solders and the fusible alloy. She is a beautiful goldsmith, a wonderful teacher, and every interaction I have had with her has been top-notch. The website: https://www.jewelryartstools.com/gold
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i use David Fell
friendly, great service, small
orders ok.
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Krugerrands and most coin gold is 90% gold, 10% copper, 22K gold is 91.67%… close enough
If you want to be completely precise, buy fine gold and alloy it with copper for yellow gold. you will need an accurate balance, since it’s by weight percent. Fine gold can be bought from most coin dealers.
!8K can also be alloyed using fine gold and copper for yellow gold. 18K gold made using silver make it somewhat green… I made my own alloys from gold coins…
you can also make your own solder…10 and 12 K gold melt at a lower temperature than higher carat gold…you will need to google gold solders because they are so varied in composition with different melting points. making silver solder is far easier, because there is a eutectic point at 40% copper and 60% silver… the eutectic composition is the lowest melting point… but you have to stay more on the silver side of the eutectic, since eutectic silver is grayish…more copper than the eutectic causes the melting point to rise and makes the silver even darker.
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Thanks,
Cliff
If you are fortunate enough to have a brokerage account and an investment portfolio, most brokerage houses will sell you bullion at spot price. You can take delivery, but will need to pay insurance and shipping and handling fees. I have kept a small portion of my portfolio in fine gold bullion. It doesn’t make me any money but it’s insurance against inflation, economic chaos and war… Hope that it never happens because everyone would end up suffering badly. I haven’t taken delivery… I don’t make jewelry anymore. taking delivery, besides insurance, shipping and handling would require renting a safety deposit box from a bank… that can be pretty costly. Brokerage houses do charge a nominal fee for storage costs, but far less than a safety deposit box. I haven’t found any other way to get precious metals at spot.
PS: once you take delivery, unless use it to make jewelry you will lose money…physical gold is not that liquid and selling it to a retailer will cost you… you won’t be able to get spot… selling it thru your brokerage account will give you spot.
I also have found that refiners aren’t very good at giving you a fair price either… they take 20% off the top. I talked to a few of them and none use electrolytic refining as it’s too expensive in terms of electricity. most use fire refining which means injecting oxygen into molten sterling or coin silver to burn out the copper… that’s something that anyone can do at home with an oxyacetylene torch…you have to melt the metal and get it yellow white hot…2,200 degrees. pure molten silver absorbs injected oxygen at 20X it’s volume and exsolves it as it cools…oxygen bubbles form in the molten metal and “spit”… spitting silver is very pure since it doesn’t oxidize when cooled to solid. I also tried once to chemically refine silver. HCl and a small amount of HN03 (aqua regia) will dissolve silver… the solution turns blue from the copper ions in it… silver chloride can be precipitated out by adding more chloride in the form of table salt… the precipitate is insoluble, so it can be washed… my experiment failed because the precipitate was too fine to be caught by an ordinary coffee filter… I think it would need a Millipore filter to work… what I did catch would turn into pure silver simply by heating… AgCl breaks down into silver and chlorine gas… don’t do that indoors.
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you can just make the solders yourself.
Always add the alloys with the lowest melting temps last so they don’t burn off compromising the recipe. Remove the flame, wait a little, add them, then heat everything up again slowly, then pour as an ingot for wire or sheet.
Here is a link from Ganoksin with the formula’s.
Good luck!
i get my (legor working alloy ) from rio grande rich yellow working alloy would be perfect for 22 k gold making ,the alloy is about 30 dollars per oz . but works perfect
I thought Kruggerands were 24K? They are marked “fine gold”. I bit one one time (I was going to melt it for an alloy anyhow) and it “bit” like fine gold 
I grew up in NC panning gold … NC gold is very close to 24K and old habits are hard to break …
Krugerrands CONTAIN an ounce of fine gold, but the actual composition is 91.6% gold and the rest copper. It’s the equivalent of 22K gold (22/24= 91.6) which has the same composition. Most if not all of coin gold is an alloy with copper added for durability… they all contain an ounce of gold from which their value comes.
To my knowledge, the only way to get fine gold is to buy fine gold bullion… The cheapest way to get fine gold bullion is to buy it in a brokerage account, if physical gold is offered… you will get the spot price… but insurance and shipping will drive up the cost of taking possession…Not all brokerage accounts allow you to take possession either… I have less than 2% of my brokerage account in physical gold as insurance against inflation… Morgan Stanley will allow me to take possession…but taking possession, especially for more than only a few ounces that you will use to make jewelry makes no sense financially… after insurance and shipping and brokerage account fees, you will also immediately lose spot value. To sell it back to a retailer or coin dealer will get you a lot less than spot…you will have to pay for a bank safety deposit box also… brokerage houses that allow you to own physical gold do charge you a nominal fee for storage…but that fee is negligible…as an investment, gold hasn’t done well at all… higher interest rates have strengthened the dollar and driven the price of gold down. Low interest rates attract money into stocks and also have driven the price of gold down… the current price is below $1,700 an ounce… about the same that it was 10 years ago…
Thank you so much jsfandskh for that clarification … because I would surely have bought krugerrands thinking they were 24K. I am now not really sure what I had many years ago, I’m pretty sure it was 24k because it was very soft - crinkled when I bit it. It was also a very small coin that was given to me. Perhaps it was not really a Kruggerand. This was many years ago. I melted it down and added it to some 24K I had to make 18K. I at least HOPE it was 24K … or my 18K was not 18k. Guess I’d better stick to the established refinereies if I am going to alloy gold. The “fine” designation on the coin is misleading.
Brent, look into Canadian gold maple leaf coins. They are 99.999% pure.
Neil A
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