I was surprised to hear that once you melt palladium in open air with
a torch it will absorb oxygen and hydrogen gasses and release them as
it cools leaving behind many gas pits in the metal. I regularly alloy
18K palladium white gold, and it alloys and rolls out beautifully. I
realize you are talking about pure palladium, but given the
chemistry, I would have thought alloying it should be difficult. I
wonder how much of the alloy needs to be palladium for the problems
to start?
I have heard of some folks who claim that they are able to torch
melt small volumes of palladium to recycle scrap. I have never
tried it but here is a link to one such conversation.
I have one friend who, perhaps not knowing you cannot remelt your
scrap palladium, struggled with it until she got it to work. She used
a very carefully neutral torch flame, with small relatively amounts
of metal. The result, predictably, was the usual porous mess. Which
she forged and rolled heavily to a wire, then rolled flat to make
bezel wire, which was her end goal. I seem to recall something about
annealing with a heavy coat of flux, which may or may not have helped
remove some of the gas porosity. Don’t know. She reported that about
half of the time, she’d end up with about half her new stock being
usable, in bits and pieces which were long enough, enough of the
time, to warrent (she felt. Not sure I agree) her effort. It’s the
sort of result I would consider pretty much a failure, but she had
rush orders to fill, no time to order new metal, and made it work
somehow. What I don’t know is what the actual quality of the bezels
she ended up with was, ie whether it looked OK, or whether there was
still noticeable porosity despite all the rolling…
I regularly alloy 18K palladium white gold, and it alloys and rolls
out beautifully. I realize you are talking about pure palladium,
but given the chemistry, I would have thought alloying it should be
difficult. I wonder how much of the alloy needs to be palladium for
the problems to start?
Like you my experience with Palladium white gold has been very good,
I really don’t know how much palladium you need in an alloy to begin
to see problems with gas absorption.
Don’t get me started. Industrial continuous arc TIG. The main
problem is how bad do want to learn to weld. You could learn to play
an instrument of your choice in about the same amount of time. You
would not have to learn to see in the dark and have your head in a
plastic bucket while learning to play the piano. But what a thrill
there is in being able to work a welded joint beyond recognition
without failure. TIG is the answer to palladium fabrication. I
uploaded a video to Bench Tube, titled Pd Bypass, a project that
started with a stick of wire, was beaten up from a size 3 to size
6.5, and ended up being modified a couple of years later. No solder.
Just Pd, TIG, and hammer application. Pd can be quite lovely.
Yall listen to Kevin. He knows this stuff. Tim and I took a one day
workshop from Mr. Lindsey and learned just how useful a TIG is for
working metals that don’t respond well to torch or laser fusing.
I have been talking with on goldsmith in my area that is working with
platinum and palladium. He said he is making own ingots for
handfabrication using torch and adding flux to his melt thus
preventing gas absorbtion. He didnt say what kind of flux he uses.
So after little search I have found melting flux for palladium -
lemeltic. On their website it is said to use it with induction
melting, but I have asked them about torch melting and they said
that it will work but you have be more carefull to not blow flux
from crucible.
Also I just recived practical goldsmith vol 1(platinum) and
6(palladium). And I must say I amd dissapointed about these books.
They are printed on quality paper, picuters and text are good
quality. There is some basic about materials and alloys
but. Thats all. No alloy and solder sompositions. Its is just book
about how to make few projects described in it and thats all. I hope
that adventures of the bench and the platium bench will have more
detailed