[Jewelry making - Article 01218] - [Orchid] Soldering Gold to Silver

[Catherine Schratt]

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    I am an amateur at fabrication-working in silver. I enjoy this forum,
    and learn from it. 

    I want to solder 14K gold wire and spheres made from this wire as
    embellishments onto my silver pieces.  I have a few books on
    fabrication, which I consulted.. One told me that I can fuse
    higher-karat gold to silver, and how to do this....but said I must
    use solder on the lower-karat golds....but not how. 

    I had some 18-karat wire. What I wanted to do was twist this wire and
    wrap it up the side of a high bezel. I tried to assemble this and
    fuse it....and ended up with a mess. I still wanted to make this
    ring, so I started over, and this time I twisted 18-karat wire with
    fine silver wire and then wrapped it up the bezel, and tucked little
    silver balls into the wire here and there for embellishment, and
    soldered them with silver solder ...which held the wire to the bezel
    as well, resulted in a rather pleasing piece actually. 

    BUT it was a compromise. I would appreciate someone talking to me
    about how to solder my 14-karat gold wire onto silver. I think I must
    have to use gold solder and gold flux.....but don't know how to keep
    the silver from melting during the soldering, and the gold from
    pitting the silver. And there are probably other things about this
    process that I don't know either!!! 

Thanks!
Catherine Schratt


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