[Jewelry making - Article 00311] - Re: [Orchid] Alloying Shakudo

[R . E . Rourke]

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    I noticed 'same crucible'. in your post that i quickly skimmed...
    therein lies the proverbial rub..use different crucibles for
    different metals..always mark what's in them and clean and recoat
    with flux when colored oxides build up in the glassy spent flux. A
    remedy you can also try to use: combine sal ammoniac and charcoal
    powder ( sal ammoniac is available at stained glass supply stores in
    a handy cube really cheap) to purify the alloy, air cool, then remelt
    in a cleaned and relined or simply different (if not open torch
    method) crucible and then use regular flux( borax/and a bit of salt
    petre for Au and just borax +boric acid for Ag) while remelting and
    pouring the ingot that may clean it well enough to yield a nice
    bright ingot that will anneal and roll smoothly. 

    Possibly use a digital scale (particularly as you get older and eyes
    go as opposed to an assayists scale) and write everything down so
    you can trace your steps when beginning to alloy with expensive
    precious metals. I mark open melt crucibles, graphite or
    composite/clay bound or fused silica with an heat proof / ultra-high
    temp conductive silver paint pen as is available at some electronics
    dealers (radio shack for example- the same pen is great for primitive
    electroforming ! ), or simply notch rather shallow marks in the
    crucible's bottoms to denote the dedicated metal that each will hold.
    I have managed to save that first ingot of gold I ever poured and
    learned basically the same lesson on mixing crucibles, or rather not
    to, with. It is a fascination that stirred me to alloying as one of
    the many passions involved with jewelry making.. 

    There is a book I highly recommend by Harold O'Connor, entitled, "the
    Jeweler's Bench Reference". though out-of-print it is still fairly
    widely available for under twenty dollars and is almost invaluable
    in the shop for those calculations, formulas, and measuring devices
    among other things that we tend to forget without a handy reference,
    in a handy format- which is what this little high mil black vinyl
    covered spiral bound book is. You should get one. ( if you want one
    but can't find it conveniently, write me off Orchid and I can help).
    As for the gold boiling out of solution i'm not certain what you
    mean, but i have only lost gold in aqua regia solution not a melting
    furnace, muffle, or crucible- although i used to come up with some
    strange tough alloys that i attributed to contamination by steel
    bits from saw blades or files, etc, in scrap reclaimation once upon a
    time, until i discovered the ease of magnetism in removing those
    micro-bits from my sweeps and scraps and filings. 

    ..and an aside to those of you who dislike my arcane uses of chemical
    terminology..too bad! that's what I know, that's what I call them,
    that's what I look for in off- the- beaten --path --stores ( and
    probably why I pay a lot less than most for items -because many don't
    recognize that the quarter pound $1. 35 sal ammoniac block in a
    stained glass supply store used for cleaning and tinning a soldering
    iron is the same sal ammoniac, or Ammonium Chloride/ NH4Cl used for
    centuries by goldsmiths for purifying metals and alloys and sold as
    Ammonium Chloride at a much higher price, per oz., by large supply
    houses that many jewelers and hobbyist metalsmiths rely on)..and I
    don't intend to rethink how I phrase my chemical terminology for the
    sole purpose of posting on Orchid at this point in my life, -
    alchemy and archaic woodcuts of 'the jewelers shop' c. 1300's is what
    attracted me to jewelry making in the first place, thank you.. 

R. E. Rourke
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