I have only recently begun to work from my own workshop at
home and all equipment is new. I have been soldering thin panels of
silver (and gold) onto 1mm thick silver pendant pieces. After
pickling and polishing the silver has had a patchy, dull, 'cloudy’
look in places - almost like condensation! - which I can’t remove. I
have never encountered this before and am baffled. I thought it may
be flux problems initially. I use a traditional borax cone, but
switched to paste and the same thing still happened. I thought it
may be a problem with the pickle salts and changed the solution, but
it didn’t fix the problem. Can anyone offer any advice?
Are you polishing the pieces before hand and then soldering and then
pickling? I recommend using boric acid and denatured alcohdol
instead of past flux. The flux will react to the waxes in the
polishing compounds.
The “skin” created after continuous heat cycles is actually fine
silver being deposited onto the surface. Each time you heat sterling,
a small amount of copper is burned off. This is known as depletion,
and for me, is very desirable.
Flux your silver, paste flux is fine, anneal, cool, pickle, rinse
and brass brush with a bit of soap and water. Repeat this 7 times.
Done slowly and without overheating, you can raise a lovely skin of
fine silver to the surface. Roller printing onto this surface is
sublime and tarnishes much, much slower than a regular sterling
piece. Oxidize the roller printed surface and the metal melds with
the patina. I like to use leaves on this one.
If you have a PMC kiln, this is perfect for annealing larger pieces.
Set the kiln to 1200, place the piece in for 1 minute each time.
-k
Karen Christians
M E T A L W E R X
50 Guinan St.
Waltham, MA 02451
Ph. 781/891-3854 Fax 3857
http://www.metalwerx.com/
Jewelry/Metalarts School & Cooperative Studio
Congratulations! You’ve discovered fire stain, aka Jeweler’s Scourge,
aka…firescale.
Anyway, it a result of soldering and must be ground and/or polished
off.
Once it’s gone, if you continue polishing, you may go through
another layer of metal and undercover more of it.
Tumbling with a descaling liquid also removes it.
Switching to a self pickling flux, like Batterns, may help.
There is a product Rio sells called Stop-ox, that you spray on your
metal before you solder and it’s supposed to prevent (or reduce?
firescale).
Elaine
Elaine Luther
Metalsmith, Certified PMC Instructor
http://www.CreativeTextureTools.com ™
Hard to Find Tools for Metal Clay
After pickling and polishing the silver has had a patchy, dull, 'cloudy' look in places -
Could it be that you’ve got a touch of firescale?
Dee
Claire,
Years ago I experienced a problem that sounds like this in polishing
silver earrings and it turned out to be a flaw in the sterling sheet
I had purchased. I was pretty new at the bench and it took me ages
to come to the idea that it was anything other than operator failure.
Have you tried different supplies of metal?
Janet