Recently I made a homemade gold alloy, against the recommendation of the very helpful people on this site. Now it seems to be coming back to bite me…
The alloy I used was a 14K rose gold with:
- 58.5% gold
- 5% Silver
- 36.5% Copper
I used .9999 fine gold from Canadian PMX aswell as .999 fine silver from the same company. My copper was copper wire from the hardware store. I was under the impression hardware store copper electrical wire was always .999 copper maybe with some oxygen and so little scope for contamination in the alloyed gold. This was apparently however not the case.
I am wondering if maybe you cannot roll rose gold? Almost everywhere I’ve looked says that rose gold can be pain to roll or even cast with. Regardless the alloy I made behaves like it had impurities.
The finished rose gold was poured into an ingot then I went on to roll it. I would roll it gently 2 or 3 times, anneal roll again a few times anneal and on the third round of rolling it would always form a mosaic like crack structure. This was NOT the normal cracks from rolling that you get, this performed like when a I tried to melt some pendants without removing solder. An alloy with impurities.
I tried annealing less often, more often, quenching while still red but nothing seemed to work. It would always form the cracks after about three rounds of rolling. I managed to get some wire as the cracks were not very deep. If anyone would be able to tell me what I did wrong and tell me source for very pure copper or master alloys for rolling I would greatly appreciate it.
I have made homemade gold alloys before. A 14k green gold alloyed with sterling as a master alloy and a 10K by adding copper (different source) to said green gold alloy to make it yellow. Both seemed to roll great and so I don’t know whether it is the fact it is rose gold, impure copper wire or something else.