Quench in pickle first

If you want to clean your metal fast, then quench in hot pickle and
rinse in water (or baking soda and water, if you prefer). Take
reasonable safety precautions against splatters and, if you do get a
splash on your skin, just rinse in water. If you’re using a mild acid
like Sparex, you have very little to worry about (short of getting
some in your eye, so keep your face out of the pickle pot!).
Quenching in water first will greatly retard the cleaning process.
Hot (or cold) metal cleans fastest in hot pickle.

Beth

Don’t quench white gold, it can make it become brittle.

MPark763@aol.com wrote:     Don't quench white gold, it can make it
become brittle. 

Quenching won’t make white golds brittle. What can happen is that if
you quench white golds from too hot (still any visible red glow), the
metal can form tiny cracks. These are what then fail, making the
metal SEEM brittle. The trick is to make sure that the gold has
cooled to around 900 degrees or so before you quench it. At this
temp, in a shadowed view, the red glow has just disappeared. Then you
quench. And here’s the second part of the trick: Quench white golds
in alcohol, not in water. Water chills the gold very quickly, which
is what causes those stress cracks. Alchol chills the gold quickly
enough to give you the softest annealed behavier, yet slowly enough
and gently enough that it won’t crack the gold by quenching. The
trouble, by the way, with NOT quenching white golds is that with
nickel based white golds, they age harden quite quickly, so that an
item slowly cooled from annealing temperatures can end up quite
substantially harder than expected. Enough so to make some types of
setting work considerably more difficult. So proper quenching after
annealing is important to getting the softest metal. Note, however,
that if you are using palladium based white golds, then quenching or
not quenching makes little difference. These alloys don’t age harden
enough for a normal air cooled item to be noticably harder.

Peter Rowe