Hi there. this would be my first attempt at a post here so I hope I
am doing this correctly.
I recently stumbled across a rather useful trick at filling pits in
cast silver. I am alloying the silver hard solder with standard
sterling silver first. in about a 60/40 (sterling/solder) the
mixture results in something with a much higher melting point then
hard solder. and behaves a lot like slush.
The main point to using this is that it seems to be extremely
resistent to undercutting while buffing later on. and often doesnt
require any burnishing to eliminate pits. also the color is much
closer to standard sterling silver. Another benifit is its got a
melting point high enough that you can use standard soldering
techniques later without risk of melting the soldering you did to
fill a pit or rebuild an incomplete casting. (had an incomplete on
casting an original piece not that long ago that this really saved
me a lot of headaches on)
While its possible to actualy fill a pit entirely with it, or
rebuild an incomplete casting with it. I am finding you can use it
to solder another piece of silver into the pit much like regular
soldering though its melting point is much higher then any standard
solder. all in all. the soldering with it looks more like welding
then soldering once you are done. but the performance in filling a
pit or rebuilding an incomplete casting is excellent.
JIM you are trying to make it stick.. Judy wants it not to stick -
she is brazing brass and copper.
I guess my point was that I have tried the tungsten rods for
soldering pics, oxidized them before use by heating with a torch and
still had experience with solder sticking to the pick with standard
white paste flux. It is not what I would call a good wetting of the
surface but it is more than enough to flow the solder onto the pick
and require grinding to clean up the pick. This happened often enough
that I donât recommend using tungsten for a solder pick. I read your
post as suggesting that it takes special processes to braze tungsten
and I was offering an instance where I do want it to stick and use a
standard torch and flux to do it.
Regards,
Jim
James Binnion @James_Binnion
James Binnion Metal Arts
Not sure if this will reach anyone so many years later! But I decided to get some titanium rods (Ti Grade 5 GR5 Titanium Rods) but they seem to repel the solderâŚwhen I try and pick up my ball of solder it splits the ball and nothing sticks! Help?
You can get titanium rods from welding supplies, Walmart in the welding dept (or order), etc. A welding shop may be the best bet as they likely have rods by the piece verses a tube of rods. Also bicycle shops may have it as it is used on high end bike frames.