How to Make a Silver Tube in 6 Simple Steps

If you need a tube of special size or wall thickness, you will have to make one yourself. In this video, I am going to show you how to make a tube at home. Only 6 simple steps. Everyone can do it. No special training is required. You see the tubes used in this saw blade holder I made 21 years ago. It was made in the way I'm gonna show you. I'm going to make a 6mm silver tube here, but you can use the same method to make tubes in any sizes and in copper, bronze, gold, and platinum as well. The protective layers on both sides are of my silver need to be removed before I can start. Step 1: Figure out how much material I need. I'm using a 0.45mm thick silver sheet here. I need the outside diameter of this tube to be 6mm. Here's the way to figure out the width of silver I need. Outside diameter plus metal thickness times pi, which is 3.14. So I need 6 plus 0.45mm times 3.14. The width I need is 20.25mm wide, but I'm going to make it 20.5mm. I use the sharp edge on my caliper to mark the measurement. This will give me a little bit extra to file the edges straight later. At the end of this strip, I draw a rounded triangle shape like this. It doesn't need to be accurate. As far as it is not too sharp, roughly will be fine. This is for my jaw tongs to hold on to later. If you make this triangle too sharp, it will break easily. Cut this shape out with a jeweler's saw. Try to keep the cutting as straight as possible. If it is not easy for you to maintain a straight line, having too much is better than cutting too much, because you can always remove the extra you have but there is no way to get it back if the material is gone. If you like this video, do you mind clicking the like button? Thank you. Step 2: Make the edge straight. File these two parallel lines with the biggest flat file you have. I'm using a 00 flat file here. No need to do anything with the other edges at this stage. They won't affect the outcome of the tube. I only file one side of my silver because the other side was cut using a guillotine by my supplier. The edge is dead straight. So if you have a guillotine, it is ideal for cutting metal like this, and you are guaranteed to have a perfect straight cut. After it is filed straight, the edge is quite sharp, so try not to hurt yourself. Once it's done, anneal the silver. This is to increase its ductility and and reduce its hardness. It will make the silver more workable. Step 3: This is a swage block. Sometimes it is called a bending block. It has many grooves on both sides. These are the punches from my damping punch set. I use the hemisphere-shaped punch to form domes. Lay them flat and they can be used in another way. Always start with the biggest groove and the biggest punch that fits. Put the silver on top of the groove and then place the punch on top of the silver, just like making sandwich. Use a ball height mallet to hit the punch. It will help if you can keep the groove, the silver, and the punch parallel to each other through the entire process. The groove I have here is shorter than the silver, so once one end is done, I move it a bit and walk along towards the other end. When it reaches the limit of the biggest groove, move on to the smaller one next to it. No need to worry if the shape is not even or there are any marks on the surface at this stage. It will curve evenly and be smoothed out later. These are the metal sticks I use to make jump rings. I use them to help curl the silver. When the silver turns hard, anneal it. This is only 0.45mm thick, so try not to overheat it, otherwise it will melt easily. Similar to the damping punches, start from the metal stick with a bigger diameter and gradually move to the smaller ones. When doing this, I keep in mind that I need to bring the two long edges together, and I want this to fit through the biggest gap on my drawer plate. I anneal it one more time before using the draw plate. I remove the fire stain on the tube with pickle so you can see it better, but when doing it yourself, you can skip this and move to use the draw plate directly. When using pickle, it is quite important to rinse the acid off and dry it thoroughly because you don't want to have any acid or water on your draw plate. Step 4: pull it through the draw plate. It went through the biggest hole earlier, so I start with the second biggest one here. Pull the tube straight out, perpendicular to the drawer plate. Start from the big one and pull through successive holes until the two edges meet. Annul the tube for every 2 to 3 holes it goes through. If the tube curls, put a steel stick into the tube and then pull. You can see it is pretty seamless here. The gap has almost disappeared, but you can see from this angle that the light still comes through the gap, so we need to close the gap by tightening some stainless steel wire along it. Keep the knot away from the gap so it will not be in the way when the solder flows. This is how the tube looks before soldering. No light through the gap anymore. Step 5: solder the seam. I use hard solder here. This will give me more choices if I need to solder other things onto the tube later. I use a bushy flame here to draw the solder into the seam. The stainless steel wire here can also stop the tube from moving around when I use the soldering pick to help the solder float. Step 6: Clean the surface. To clean the excess flux and fire stain of the tube, it is very important to remove the stainless steel wire before submerging it in pickle. Cut off the not-so-perfect end and file the section flat. This tube measures 6mm diameter. To remove the excess solder, clean it with a file, sandpaper, and then polish it. This is how the tube on this saw blade holder was made over 2 decades ago. You can use this method to make tubes for stone settings, bells for pendants, hinges, and other findings. Tube making works best when the metal thickness is 6mm or less. If you want to make a tube with a thicker wall, make a tube with a much larger diameter than you need. Do the same as before, solder the seam, clean the tube, and continue drawing it through the draw plate until you get the diameter that you want. In this way, the wall will be made thicker. If you like this video, you might want to check out the one here. I will see you in the next video.