Hey everyone!
I had a rather random question about mokume (one that I feel I should know the answer to, but oh well).
I’d like to make a billet of platinum, 14kt yellow, and 14kt red gold, and fortunately had a thought before I started it: If platinum anneals at 1800 degrees F, and 14kt yellow gold melts at 1550, how in tarnation do I get the billet annealed for each subsequent working step without melting the gold elements? Could I, say, put it in a furnace at 1400 degrees for an extended amount of time (like a few hours)?
I know I’ve seen mokume with this composition, but I’m at a loss as to how the heck they anneal the darn thing.
Cheers!
Scott
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You’re annealing should never be over the estética point of you’re metals in the billet , never the less I believe longer anneal holding timed do work , I’ve made lots of silver/palladium Mokume and just hold my torch at as hot as I can without melting the silver and count 10 seconds for the temp to penetrate the inside of the billet
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I’ve never done mokume, but I have a book on it so I was just going to post what it says in the hopes that maybe you’ll find it helpful. So it says the first step is of course to make a billet of metal by submitting the sheets to intense heat in a reduction atmosphere under pressure so that the metals join together without the use of solder, which creates a more superior billet than soldering the sheets does. For this, you have to prepare special alloyed sheets of different precious metals, the key to which is their copper content. The amount of copper added to the metals changes the fusing (and therefore annealing) points so that they are all very close to one another no matter what precious metal they contain. Their hardness is then also similar, and once the sheets fuse they are compatible when forged and rolled. There’s a table of alloys and percentages used specifically in mokume gane, and you combine those alloys with each other in different proportions. So I guess the alloys you use in mokume are actually different from the alloy concentrations we use in Western jewelry. So if you really want to do mokume gane the traditional way then you use these different Japanese alloy concentrations, which you’d have to do in order to make the different metals all have close to the same melting and annealing points. Which makes sense, I mean of course they would have their own traditional alloy concentrations from us, it’s a different system. The different alloy concentrations they use all have Japanese names, which I don’t understand. I apologize if any of this was already known to you and I’m just repeating information you already have. I saw your question and realized, hey I just read about that recently! So figured I’d try to help. If you do want the alloy tables they use just let me know, I’ll post them here. Happy making!
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I also just realized this post is nearly a year old so probably way past time for this info to be helpful at all! Sorry!