[Jewelry making - Article 01010] - Re: [Orchid] Difficulty Fusing

[sbright]

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Hi Kim

    Yes 30 degrees is too cold to work in. Your fingers freeze to the
    torch and you can't pull the flame off at precisely the right moment.
    lol Seriously, the two pieces you are trying to fuse together are way
    too thin for this process. You would need to get the bottom plate hot
    enough to fuse (but not melt) prior to the bezel melting. (which
    would be the trick) The way I would do that is to sweat the bezel
    onto the bottom plate using medium solder. Apply heat from the
    underneat 'till your solder starts to flow, then guide the solder
    with the flame. It will flow to the hotter spot. Do this untill the
    solder has run all the way around your bezel. Keep in mind, that the
    plate will heat up slower than the bezel so heat it first. 

    The hiss in your flame suggests that you have too much oxygen and a
    very sharp flame. You want a softer flame so that it will eat up the
    oxygen surrounding the work spot to try to prevent oxydation. Solder
    won't flow onto an oxydized spot. A softer flame will also slow
    things down a little for you so if you overheat a spot, it wont ball
    up on you as fast and you'll have a chance to correct your flame. Use
    borax and flux as you do this and keep in mind not to pickle anything
    untill you are totally done soldering, otherwise you will have to
    superheat your piece to try to get the solder to flow and even then
    you won't get good results. 

    Now, if you had a laser welder.. you could weld these two together
    without much danger of melting anything. I just got one from
    laserstar. It's an amazing machine. 

Stanley Bright
aandmjewelers.com
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