I use PH minus in my pickle pot. Seems to work fine, though somewhat
slower than the commercial stuff. Personally I think that the
difference is something else. I use the PH minus in my home studio
and the commercial pickle in my class. Which brings up some
interesting questions: Has anyone seen a difference between pickling
a piece soldered with Propane vs Acetylene? What is the optimum
temperature of a pickle pot?
Shane Morris
Druids Grove Unique Gifts
What is the optimum temperature of a pickle pot?
Shane, don’t know about optimum temperature, but 10 years ago I took
a number of courses in fabrication at a local community college and
there were three approaches for pickling that were practiced in that
school. Incidentally the instructor used a saturated solution of Ph
Decreaser. The first approach was to quench hot soldered items in
water first, then place in hot pickle (heated in a crock pot on
medium temp). This resulted in really quick pickling. The second
approach quenched the hot soldered items directly in COLD pickle.
This also resulted in quick pickling. The third option was quenching
the hot soldered item first in cold water, then placing in cold
pickle and leaving for about 15 minutes. All three methods worked
fine. It was my understanding that particularly in the case of
sweat soldering the item should be quenched (after the red glow was
gone) in cold water first to avoid having the solder “drawn into” the
space between the two layers in the event that there was not 100%
coverage of solder and additional soldering might be needed. I’m not
a chemist or physicist so don’t know the technical cause/effect bit
on this, but in practice it seemed useful to know and worked. In
this classroom setting we worked both with acetylene and with
oxy/propane and there didn’t seem to be any difference in the effects
in pickling that I could see. Perhaps someone wiser than I has the
answer.
K