[Jewelry making - Article 00382] - Re: [Orchid] Cleverwerx soldering set

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>     I have no trouble getting silver solder to flow on tungsten TIG
>     electrodes if they are well fluxed. So I find them less than
>     useful for silver soldering or gold soldering. Maybe it is my use
>     of paste flux? 

    True enough on all points. The paste fluxes in particular will do
    this much more than, say, Batterns, or boric acid by itself. I didn't
    mention that I prepare the picks by heating the tips bright orange
    while still clean of any flux, so they get a good thick oxide layer,
    which helps repel the solder some. Even so, they do take to solder
    more than titanium does. However, even titanium will now and then
    find itself tinned too, so for me it's a minor distinction. Plus,
    I'm not always averse to having a little solder tinning. I find it
    makes some types of joints a little easier, especially very delicate
    joins needing very tiny amounts of solder, where sometimes you can
    simply wick a little of what's already stuck to the pick instead of
    getting more. Because the tungsten is pretty cheap, I have several
    picks with color coded handles, so contaminating a solder joint with
    the wrong class of metal isn't a problem. And it's just a moments
    work to sand one clean and reheat to oxidize when I need to use a
    different solder on a given pick. 

>     Also Tungsten is a much better heat conductor than titanium so you
>     definitely need to put the tungsten into some kind of handle that
>     is not so good at conducting heat. 

    True. But wood dowels make that easy, and I find the larger diameter
    of a handle makes the picks more comfortable to use anyway. A bit of
    nail polish or something to color code the handle also makes the
    pickes easy to find on my sometimes rather "busy" bench [[ "hey
    Peter. Dontcha mean cluttered as hell?"]] {{Oh, OK. Yeah... Um. :-)
    }} So well, maybe those of you better organized don't need the more
    visible color coding. But I like it. 

>     But for platinum work they do a much better job than titanium or
>     any other material I have tried. 

    And that's probably the deciding factor for me too. Since I do work
    with platinum and now, palladium, I hate grabbing a pick and finding
    that it happens to be a material unsuited to the metal I'm working
    with and it's temperature range. Tungsten is fine with any of them,
    so no mixups. If I were still working with only silver, I'd probably
    still be using just old pieces of coat hanger wire... 

    Oh, and Jim. that extrusion patterned metal on the web site you sent
    us to is just amazing. Awsome, dude. Are you guys selling the raw
    material, or just finished product? 

Cheers
Peter
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