[Jewelry making - Article 00158] - Re: [Orchid] To quench or not to quench, that is the question

[James Binnion]

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>     Simple, everyday tasks. And you just heat it, and it's soft. No
>     muss, no fuss. 

    That may be true for you and many of the other experienced jewelers
    and metalsmiths on the list who have calibrated their eye over years
    of experience. But not so simple for beginners and frankly a large
    number of metalsmiths and jewelers I have seen over-anneal, either
    by being too hot or too often or both. So they blame the metal or
    some other reason but not the fact they fried the metal or never
    worked it enough between annealings. The difference in color output
    for a dull oxidized and brightly polished surface is almost a factor
    of 10. Also the surface you are annealing on will typically be
    glowing much brighter than the metal and then there is the bright
    yellow sodium flare from the borax in the flux. Yes 900 degrees is a
    barely visible red in a dark room ( hard to do without blacking out
    the windows) but in any kind of light it is virtually impossible to
    see that glow. Flux has not even cleared at that temperature and will
    still have a slightly frosty white appearance, the lowest melting
    fluxes available to us (white paste flux) don't fully melt till 1100
    F and most are somewhat higher. In every shop I have ever been in it
    is way too brightly lit to see the glow from polished metal at 900 F
    or probably even 1000 F. I routinely heat material to forge in a
    calibrated kiln to 1100 F, in the ambient shop light I can not see
    it glow, you need to shade it to see the glow. So I may be wrong
    about this but I believe that most of us over heat the metal when we
    use a torch to anneal because there is no reliable feedback for the
    correct temperature. 

Regards,

Jim

James Binnion
jbin AT mokume-gane.com
James Binnion Metal Arts
http://www.mokume-gane.com
360-756-6550
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