[Jewelry making - Article 00047] - Re: [Orchid] Discolored tubmler barrel

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>       ANY advice would be appreciated.  I'm feeling SO desparate. 
>     Thanks. Trudy 

    The one other thing I notice you didn't mention is your water.  I
    wonder whether there's some slight impurity, some sulphur based
    compound, perhaps, that could be tarnishing the silver.  Some
    municipal water supplies vary with seasonal changes, when the water
    is from a surface watershed or reservoirs, rather than deep aquafer
    wells.  In that case, summer warm weather might require a city to
    change treatments or additives to ensure safe water.  I wonder
    whether that coulf affect it, and whether using commercially bottled
    water, or perhaps even distilled water, might eliminate the problem. 
    I bacame aware of this with my fish tank, noticing significant
    differences in the ph, and the chlorine/chloramine levels in Seattle
    water from winter to summer.  Both the above are significant when
    maintaining a fish tank.  Perhaps is't somehow also significant to
    your tumbler.  In addition to the safety additives, municipalities
    may add alkaline additives to raise the ph in order to retard
    corrosion.  These too, might have some effect. 

    And I'd suggest that dish soaps may not be the best choices.  many
    handwash detergents have various skin moisurizers, and perhaps
    disinfectants, etc, added, some of which might react with your metal. 
    I don't know this for sure, it's just a guess.  But worth trying. 

    Also, I'd suggest not mixing different types of metal (gold with
    silver) in the same batch.  Sometimes you get some transfer from the
    softer metal to the harder, or other such reactions. 

    I'm surprised you needed to send your shot to Rio for cleaning. 
    they'll be happy to sell you some steel shot cleaner, which you run
    in the barrel with just the shot, instead of burnishing soap.  Cleans
    it quite well.  And I'd want to make sure your flow through system is
    set up so as to be sure you're not accidentally rinsing all your
    burnishing compound or soap out of the charge with the flow through. 
    It should be set to instroduce not just water, but water with the
    burnishing soap/compound, to maintain the level of compound in the
    tubler. frankly, I've never found smaller tumblers to really nead a
    flow through system all that badly, though they're convenient.  I
    used to use an old but aggressive rotary tumbler with ordinary steel
    shot and the standard powdered burnishing compound with both silver
    and gold (one at a time).  After running the needed time, upon
    opening the tumbler, the water would now be a foaming grey to black
    gunk well in need of a good rinsing.  But the silver or gold would
    be clean and bright. 

Hope that helps.
Peter

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