30 Pieces Of Silver

26Feb09

How often do you find yourself in this situation?

On my workbench at the moment there are about thirty pieces of silver jewellery at various stages of completion.

I prefer to solder pieces in a batch, and after they come out of the pickle they sit there waiting to be polished. Dum-de-dum. If they could tap their feet impatiently, I’d hear nothing else all day week month.

I enjoy setting stones, and soldering is sheer pleasure (playing with fire and very very hot metal!:-D). But then it’s the boring bit, when it seems like it’s all work. Polishing.  I don’t like polishing. All right, it isn’t polishing I hate, it’s sanding.

Actually, it’s finding firescale – which only seems to happen at the last stages of polishing. You know what I mean – it all looks perfect, ready for the buff, Tripoli and rouge… then you spot the dark mark under the surface. It takes time to remove firescale, and it’s tempting to hope no-one will notice and just go ahead with the buffer anyway.

Bad move.

Firescale is made worse by buffing because copper oxide (what firescale is composed of) is harder than silver.  When you polish the metal, the silver is removed quicker than the firescale!

Yuk.

It’s out with the sandpaper or the Water of Ayr stone to rub off the dark patches. When you can’t see any more firescale, viewing the piece from all angles under different light sources, just try one last glance holding a piece of tracing paper against the metal. Somehow that seems to highlight any firescale lurking in dark corners.

I have begun to use argentium silver recently, which should remove the appearance of firescale almost completely. Apparently the proportion of silver is the same as ordinary Sterling (92.5% Ag), but some of the copper is replaced by germanium, and as a result the alloy doesn’t oxidise in quite the same way. There is a really clear illustration of this in Cynthia Eid’s paper to SNAG. This is a PDF file on Rio Grande’s website.

You could also take a peek at the Argentium Silver Company website, which has a rather pretty gallery of work from a variety of makers and a bundle of technical information, including US stockists (try not to get waylaid by Rings & Things! ).

Filed under: Jewellery, silversmithing   |  5 Comments
Tags: argentium, craft, firescale, flaws, handmade, jewelry, metalsmith, silver, soldering, uk