Silver Casting

"Ted Frater" wrote in message
...
snip
the other option would be to cast a cylinder from the silver, then
turn the whole chalice up in a lathe. Fine silver turns very well.

Do you (or anyone else) have any machining info for it? speed and feed, rake
angles for tools, etc? I'd like to do some silver parts, but am stuck in a
tiny workspace, no room for casting, plating, etc. but I do have a lathe in
there (somewhere under all the other tools :-) )

On a vaugely related topic, can precious metals be heat treated to harden
them like steel can? I understand annealing to soften, and work-hardening,
but it seems like if a piece was hardened it would resist wear better.
just an idle curiousity...

Thanks,

Gene

Jack Schmidling wrote:

Where does one get the dies?

You don't buy dies, you make 'em.

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com

"Carl West"

keywords to guide you to info that'll help:
eutectic
phase diagram
liquidus
solidus

I know all those words.. my company was in the business of manufacturing
integrated circuits and soldering and bonding was an integral part of the
business.

In spite of all this, I do not understand how adding a high temp metal to a
low temp metal can lower the melting temp of the lower. Just a mental block
I guess.

I was active on a brewing list about twelve years ago, I think I
recognize your name from there.

I have a defective gene that produces "impulsive entrepreneurial syndrome".

My hobbies always seem to turn into a business of some sort and I developed
the MALTMILL (r) about that time and we still sell about 1000 a year with
no end in site.

Browse my homepage and you find something for sale under every catagory
except sausage.

js

--
PHOTO OF THE WEEK: http://schmidling.netfirms.com/weekly.htm
Astronomy, Beer, Cheese, Gems, Sausage, http://schmidling.netfirms.com

It turns rather like soft aluminium. Use the same feeds , tool rake etc
you would use for this metal. when I did the paper weights I hada very
poor small lathe but it worked ok for what i needed at the time.
Just go ahead and do it.



gene lewis wrote:
"Ted Frater" wrote in message
...
snip

the other option would be to cast a cylinder from the silver, then
turn the whole chalice up in a lathe. Fine silver turns very well.


Do you (or anyone else) have any machining info for it? speed and feed, rake
angles for tools, etc? I'd like to do some silver parts, but am stuck in a
tiny workspace, no room for casting, plating, etc. but I do have a lathe in
there (somewhere under all the other tools :-) )

On a vaugely related topic, can precious metals be heat treated to harden
them like steel can? I understand annealing to soften, and work-hardening,
but it seems like if a piece was hardened it would resist wear better.
just an idle curiousity...

Thanks,

Gene

3rd para from the end of your last post, Evils of soft soldering,..... etc.
Now if you recall Ive never knocked soft soldering and I dont consider
it evil in comparison to hard ie braze silver soldering., its a valid
joining method when its used for products its best at. Like lap joining
say a zinc gutter pipe or small brass objects. the key to making it
work well is to design the join so that theres a proper contact area
between the parts to be joined.
Now getting back to your soldering a stone setting to say a pewter
chalice or even a brass one,. This is what you do,
you make your stone setting out of the same material as the chalice
body. Lets say brass. Is easier than pewter or copper. this is a
simple strip of thin, say 20/1000in which you snip out little triangles
so you can bend the angle around the stone. overlap it say by 1/4in and
cut off the surplus.
Now you have a little shallow cup with a hole in the bottom. use your
soldering iron and tin the overlap where they overlap.
Position the overlap so its the right size for the stone, hold with
steel tweezers togethwer, and gently heat with a soft flame of your
propane torch.
youll find the 2 surfaces will sweat together.
Let it set.
place face side down on a board./bench and with the soldering iron
tin the what will be the contact areas to the chalice body with solder.
Pick it up with tweezers and start to heat the brass chalice from the
inside and a little on the outside. when you think its up to soldering
temp, place your pre tinned stone mount where you want it to be on the
chalice side and heat the chalice only. assoon as the solder is melting
press the mount down .the solder will sweat to the chalice nad hold it
there. use electronic resin cored solder fed into the joints from the
inside of the mount so that you get just the right amount visible from
the outside to make a nice fillet Do not use the iron to make the joint..
hold it in place till it cools and youve done one. Repeat for the
other settings you plan . If you heat GENTLY, with a soft slow flame the
area where you want to solder the other settings wont get hot enough to
fall off.
If you worried about this solder the mounts 180 deg to each other
Allow the chalice to cool between each soldering operation. .

there you go.


Jack Schmidling wrote:
"Peter W.. Rowe,"


vise? what in the dickens are you doing with a vise in all this? Place

the

work loosely on a charcoal block, fire brick.....


I was using a fire brick but thought if I just held it in the very corner of
the vice, it would sink less heat. Can't win em all.



How 'bout a simple experiment first. Take a Small piece of silver, and

put a

bit of flux on it, and then a bit of solder on the flux. Just melt the

flux

onto the silver, to get an idea of how hot it needs to be and how it will

look....

I will try this tomorrow but that reminds me of what I read about the
HandyFlux somewhere. It referred to a chart that showed a relationship
between temp and color of the flux but there was no chart.

I gather it wants to be clear but like solder, it can get hot without the
part getting hot. I was able to get a ball or two to stick but nothing like
wetting the surface so far.


But
that all gets into the whole art of stone setting, virtually a profession

all

by itself. We'd probably best get you comfortable with just ordinary

silver

soldering first...


Frankly, the more we discuss this, the more it seems that the evils of soft
soldering are more in the mind of those who know how to do hard soldering.
For now, it seems like a bandaid I can live with but I am clueless as to
setting stones and cutting them is my bag and it would be fun not to hve to
buy settings. So if you can point me to a book on this "limited" subject, I
will order it.

BTW, I just had a brainstorm for making my broach. I call it a broach but
I really mean a setting for multiple stones that can be soldered en mass to
something like a chalice.

I have never used it but a friend of my wife makes really neat stuff with
polymer clay. I can fiddle and futz till I get what I want then bake it in
the toaster oven and voila... a free form pattern for sand casting.

js

Jack Schmidling wrote:

"Carl West"


keywords to guide you to info that'll help:
eutectic
phase diagram
liquidus
solidus


I know all those words.. my company was in the business of manufacturing
integrated circuits and soldering and bonding was an integral part of the
business.

Beside of mentioning that, try to take 600 or 800 silver. The melting
point is lower, normally it is thinner flowing. For Your casting you
need an alloy wich is flowing far and thin. So You need high
temperatures over the melting point. The thickness shouldn´t be thinner
as 1 mm. For thinner castings (in oilsand) I suggest "AC 9.105" alloy
add 0,4 %. It makes the ally thinner fluid without lowering the melting
temperatures remarkable.

Here is a link.
http://www.schmuckfabrik.de/englisch.html

Best wishes,
Heinrich Butschal


--
www.juwelen.online-boerse.org
www.meister-atelier.de
www.schmuckfabrik.de

Jack Schmidling wrote:

In spite of all this, I do not understand how adding a high temp metal to a
low temp metal can lower the melting temp of the lower. Just a mental block
I guess.

Yup. Just accept that it is so.
Perhaps thinking of it as adding together the 'meltability' of the
metals will help.



I was active on a brewing list about twelve years ago, I think I
recognize your name from there.

... I developed
the MALTMILL (r) about that time ...

Ah.

--


If you try to 'reply' to me without fixing the dot, your reply
will go into a 'special' mailbox reserved for spam. See below.


--
Carl West http://carl.west.home.comcast.net

change the 'DOT' to '.' to email me

"Clutter"? This is an object-rich environment.

Jack Schmidling wrote:


In spite of all this, I do not understand how adding a high temp metal to a
low temp metal can lower the melting temp of the lower. Just a mental block
I guess.

So what. And if you understand, what difference would that make? A teacher of
mine once said: "In life, understanding gets you the booby prize."

One of my goldsmithing teachers in Germany, Professor Klaus Ullrich, who in the
early 60's was the inventor of welding in jewelry, which was not yet done at
that time, told me that he did not understand gold metallurgy at all. He wrote
articles about welding studies on gold alloys about it. Maybe I can find the
copies of those articles, that I know I have somewhere (they are in German). He
did not care to "understand" the why of the behavior of alloys, and the apparent
contradictions.

He was a pragmatist. When you do this and this, the result is that. He did not
give a damn about the why or try to undertand it. Even metallurgists do not
understand these things.

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com

Jack Schmidling wrote:

Any thoughts..

Plenty.

better ideas?

Many.

I don't think you want to hear either my thoughts or ideas about this. You are
just too stubborn for me to get anything useful into your head.

What you need is a basic jewelry making class somewhere. You lack all and any
the basic jewelry training, and yet you seemingly want to continue to teach
yourself to become a goldsmith through an online forum. You are on a certain
track, and nothing is going to get you off that track. You seem to have
determined how this should be done, and you are looking for information that
justifies that track. Maybe you should contact the CIA and/or the FBI. I hear
they are good at supplying information like that.

Ain't gonna happen here though.

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com

"P.W. Rowe," wrote:


Or, you could spend a few bucks and actually buy a book. A lot of folks have
gotton good starts with Tim McCreights "complete metalsmith" books, and there
are many others out there worthy of notice. Too bad your library is so poorly
stocked. If you can find a Borders or Barnes and Noble book store around
somewhere, they usually have a decent, if variable, selection. Or try ebay.
Charles Lewton-Brain sells a number of find books through ebay, at a good
price, including his recent (and wonderful) translation of the classic german
text on goldsmithing, Brehphols "Theory and Practice of Goldsmithing".


I mentioned that last book a few posts ago, as well as the book by Oppi
Untracht. Both with links to how and where to get them. It seems that he does
not want to hear that kind of information though. He has set his track to
reaching his goal, and that's the way he'll get there. Not!



You simply didn't get it hot enough. Hard soldering a small piece onto a
larger thick piece in silver can be problematic, since silver is such a good
heat conductor.

He lacks the basic knowledge about goldsmithing and soldering silver, for him to
even know this. He need to take a class somewhere, but seems to stubborn to do
this.

discovered, and as we've been trying to tell you all along,

And what makes you even remotely think, that he was going to listen. This man
comes here for advice from professionals, gets it, and then doesn't folow it.
And then he talks about "mental block". Surprise.

For some reason he thinks he knows better to get to his desired result, than
what a handful of professionals, with a combined experience of several hundred
years, know.

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com