[Jewelry making - Article 01341] - Re: [Orchid] Clean solder?

[Thackeray Taylor]

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This is a great post!

    When I was starting out about 20 years ago I did the "feeding wire
    solder into the joint" thing and my experience was not so good, it
    was to messy and I personally had a hard time steadying my hand and
    feeding the wire solder (gotta have my coffee in the morning). Too
    many times I would melt the wire above my work and it would  blob or
    run into areas I didn't want it to, or I would bump my work with the
    wire and I'd have to stop and reposition everything. Personally this
    technique did not work for me. However, for sometime I did continue
    to use wire solder almost exclusively. I would cut it and lay it in
    the joint then heat and pull the flow through the joint of my larger
    work. As I started to use sheet or paillons I found my soldering
    skills actually got much better, less is more type of thing. One of
    the great things about sheet solder is you can place your paillons,
    "or sandwich it", between metal such as ring shanks, this minimizes
    cleanup if done properly. 

    One other consideration is solder is precious metal and can get
    expensive, you certainly don't want to run 18k or even 14k plumb
    wire solder if you can avoid it. Basically there is a purpose for
    all the different solders and everyone is different and has their
    own comfort zones, what works for me my not work for anyone else,
    kinda the cool thing about the jewelry trade as a whole. 

    Least likely to be used by me, in order is, powder (never used it)
    paste, wire then sheet. 

Thanks for the great post.

Thackeray Taylor
Rio Grande Technical Support
800-545-6566 ex 13903

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