Re: fusing a bezel to the base sheet
If you are not going to granulate or enamel the piece, then your life will be much easier if you just solder it using 22K easy (or 20K, whatever you have). Place the pallets inside the bezel and heat from below on a mesh screen. An excellent resource for working with gold is “Soldering Demystified” https://www.amazon.com/Soldering-Demystified-Ms-Jeanette-Caines/dp/0615888429, which features gold (not silver, like most books). Basically the principle is that you ladder down with gold solder, so that the first round is 22 easy, then the next is 21 easy, the next 20 easy, and so on down the line. No hard/medium, etc. like with silver.
There is also an old blog I found, which also has more information about the book and working with gold in general http://www.solderingdemystified.com/blog/. Jeanette is the current director of Jewelry Arts and is involves in a fascinating project investigating the ancient techniques. Jeanette also formulated G Glue, which I found works really well for granulation. HTH…
If you decide to go the solder route I have some favorite tricks for bezels. Be sure to ball up your solder and not use flat pallions. A ball of solder will touch both the bottom plate and the bezel at the same time thus reducing the odds of having the solder flow to just one or the other. I also like to take my nice Starrett sharp scribe, (a compass point held in a mechanical pencil will do nicely), and scribe a nice sharp line on the inside and the outside of the plate where the bezel touches. The solder will want to go to the line and fill it in. Thus leaving a prefect seam with no puddling on the inside or over flow on the outside. I often us a tiny drop of super glue in 4 spots to hold the bezel in place while I scribe the lines. I then remove the glue with acetone as the fumes when heated are pretty toxic. I so love working in 22kt.
Jo, that’s a brilliant idea to scribe the lines. I’ve figured out a way that for me works 99% of the time, but there are those times you want to take a 10 lbs. Hammer to the piece. THANK YOU!!
The only problem with balling up high-karat gold solder is that sometimes you can’t get it to re-flow (whatever alloy they used has burnt off during the balling-up), plus the little buggers tend to roll around (I have essential tremor, so the traditional way of using a soldering pick is a non-starter). I cut a tiny pallet and use just a dab of the gold color liquid flux (or Ronda Coryell’s purple flux) only at the juncture, and then heat the piece very, very slowly in a circular motion from the outside so the pallet doesn’t fly off. I like the idea of scribing the line. Another trick is to use non-toxic glue like blu stick if you need to solder pieces without a back sheet. You can use cigarette paper to keep the pieces from moving around, just cut off the excess before soldering.
Makena- You are so right about reheating solder. I always warn new students that they have only two or three tries to get the solder to flow. Every time any kind of solder heated it needs a higher temp to flow as the alloys burn off. After 2-3 tries I insist that they remove the old solder and start fresh.
When I ball my solder I only heat it til it just balls up.
What kind of torch do you use? I have natural gas and oxy so that I can start out with a reducing flame and then tighten up when the metal gets close to soldering temp. Also have you tried white paste flux? I dilute my paste flux till it’s a bit more liquid. I prefer it because it holds up better at higher temps that the liquid gold soldering flux. .
I always start off with a very soft flame and sneak up on the metal to heat it very slowly so that the flux doesn’t make the solder do a disco dance. I am constantly moving my torch very fast. I find that as I move the torch rapidly the lighter bezel material goes hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold while the larger base piece slowly gets warmer.
Jo
Re: torches – a 0 or 00 tip Smith torch or a blazer torch for stovetop jewelry (I live in NYC in an apt so I can’t have a real torch due to FDNY regulations). I’ve gotten very creative with the gas range–I learned that it works just fine for annealing metal as well as fusing jump rings (I’m pondering how I can create a small stovetop kiln for annealing coiled wire). For granulation and general fusing onto a base I use an ultralight beehive kiln with a 0 or 1 torch tip, depending. I was taught with the 0 but learned that the 1 gives a softer, brushy flame over a larger area so I’m less likely to fry the piece and/or have granules pop off afterwards. The blazer torch is too short to fuse with the kiln, but it works fine on solderite or charcoal.