I have read that one can bezel a stone in place by
electroforming--so couldn't the technique be used to build up a bond
(and strength) for my antennae??
Sounds good, but in practice, this may not be the best way for you to
do it. electroforming in silver, first off, is not as easy as, say,
doing it with an acid copper bath. You’ll be mucking around and
spending cash quite a bit to get the process just to give you a nice
deposit before you can even address your specific need.
Plus, remember that electroforming, like electroplating, acts most
strongly on the most exposed areas of a piece. Getting good
deposition in a crevice is quite difficult, as the metal wants to
deposit on the ridges. What will tend to happen is you’ll build up
lots of silver on the antenae themselves, especially the ends, with
little if any deposition down near the joint, since the extending
wires will draw the current away from those areas. So then you stop
it all off with resist, leaving only those little areas exposed…
But even this isn’t as simple as it seems, since cyanide silver
solutions are rather good cleaners, and getting a resist to stay long
enough to electroform a substantial amount of metal isn’t so simple
either. Even then, you’ll got no deposition down within a seam such
as solder might do, but will build up only on exposed surfaces. This
might be made to work, but is it what you want?
It seems to me that a simple solution would be to use a different
technology to perform the soldering operation, which is still
basically what you wish to do, after all. Since getting around the
heat sinking ability of your bee’s body without melting the find parts
is difficult to do with a torch, try using a kiln. Paste solder is
probably the easiest to use, in a grade easier than those used to
solder the rest of the item. You’ll need some sort of fixture that
can hold parts in position, perhaps made from soldering or casting
investment. Then place the piece, properly fluxed or with the right
paste solders applied where needed, in the kiln, and fire it only to
slightly above the flow temp of the solder. This way, the whole piece
is heating evenly, nothing can melt but the solder, and when it’s
cool, you should then have a good and well soldered joint. and a kiln
capable of doing this will be cheaper than setting up an
electroforming tank by far, as well as safer to use. Then when
you’re done, if you like you can use it for enamelling too.
Kiln soldering, while less used by individual craftsmen, is the way
many jewelry parts, especially gold ones, are assembled in industry.
And it’s also remeniscent of the way things were often soldered back
before the development of torches in the first place. If you can
modify your kiln to give you consistant reducing atmospheres as well
as controllable temps, you could even assemble a thing such as your
bee entirely without actual solder, using granulation techniques.
Consider all the fine ancient granulated jewelry in gold, mostly, that
attached superfine constructions of wire and filligree, often to
heavier suppoert structures of one sort or another, with sufficient
strength to hold up just fine over the centuries, yet without actual
solder, or sometimes, even visible joints. Those things were fired
just over charcoal hearths of one sort or another. Even slow heating
gets around the fact that fine parts heat faster than thick ones…
Peter Rowe