Perfect Your Soldering Technique | Silver & Gold Jewelry Making

If you're new to jewelry making, soldering is one of the most vital skills you are going to learn. Silver and gold are very expensive these days. If you are not careful, the material you use will have to go to scrap. That means the value of your material will drop significantly. In this video, I'm going to show you the fundamental points of soldering your silver and gold jewelry. Once you have mastered these few things, it's very unlikely you will fail when soldering jewelry. I learned some of these tips from a very experienced Austrian bench jeweler who was about to retire back in 2003 in Birmingham Jewelry Quarter, UK. His name is Peter. I haven't seen him for over 21 years now, and I don't think he watches YouTube, but just hope he is well. The rest of the tips I am sharing with you in this video are from my over 2 decades of practice. Hi, I'm a jeweler, optical diamond setter, and a GIA graduate gemologist based in the UK. I have been making jewelry using real gemstones and precious metals since 2003. It has taken me over 20 years to get to this point. In my channel, I help jewelry enthusiasts to start their jewelry making and hand engraving projects with very limited space at home. First thing first, When you are joining two parts together, you want to make the gap between these two as small as possible.

This means you will have less of a gap to fill. When this is done properly, you will have laid down the foundations for a stronger bond. For beginners, most of the time you only need to join two surfaces. The best way to achieve this is by making the two surfaces flat first. For instance, if I'm joining two ends of a wire to make a ring or jump ring, I normally use the coarsest file to get the sections flat. When the wires are too thick, or when no matter how hard I try, the two sections are still meeting at an angle. I will use my jeweler's saw to cut into the gap where they meet. Occasionally, when the angle is too big, I have to cut into the gap twice or even three times to close the gap. This is the first step of soldering. It gets the solid foundations for a successful joint.

Next, you want to make the joints clean. On the other hand, there are many ways to make the joints dirty.

Let me use the silver ring as an example again. If my hands are oily, the grease will pass onto the two sections easily. If I just heated up the silver without applying anything onto the surface, the two sections will become oxidized.

To avoid this, before soldering, I wash my hands with detergent. What's more important is not to apply any hand cream after that. But I do find my hands turn greasy from time to time. Whenever this happens, I have to keep washing them.

That's why you can always find my hands looking very ugly in my videos here, but that's the trade-off if you want to make beautiful jewelry, to avoid having to solder the two oxidized sections, which will produce a weaker joint. After heating up the silver wire to make it workable, I remove the oxidized surface either with a file or with my saw. Once the two ends meet nicely, I would not heat up this wire again before soldering. By doing these two things, I can make sure the two sections I am going to join with solder are as clean as possible. Once the two sections fit perfectly and they are clean, what I do next is to apply flux onto the joint.

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Because rings are one of the most common pieces you will make as a beginner, let's keep using it as an example. The flux I use is the very traditional one. I first suck a drop of water using a plastic tube, drop it into the ceramic borax dish, and then grind the borax cone for about 20 seconds. I simply brush it into the joint and make sure to cover a little around the soldering area as well. The borax serves two functions here. First, it helps the solder to float into the joint. That's why the borax needs to go into the gap. Second, it prevents the area directly around the joint from oxidizing. That's why I apply it a little bit around the gap as well.

I was told to do that when learning soldering in 2003, the old-school way. At that time, I only followed the instructions I was given, but didn't understand the reasons for it back then. Doing these things will give me a stronger bond. After the flux is on, you need to use the right solder. There are 5 types of solder: extra hard solder, hard solder, medium solder, easy solder, extra easy solder. Extra hard solder has the highest melting point. That is specially designed for enamel jewelry because the jewelry needs to go into a kiln to melt the enamel. The solder on the joint must have a high melting point to withstand the heat. Otherwise, no matter what you have just soldered will come undone before the enamel melts. Extra easy solder has the lowest melting point. Let's take silver solder for example. Compared to other solder which has a higher melting point, Extra Easy solder has the least silver in it. That's why the color looks a bit yellowish. But if you are repairing jewelry, using Extra Easy solder will lower the chance of melting any existing joints.

As a beginner, if there is only one joint in the jewelry you make, like if you are making a ring, or soldering the pin on the back of an air post, simply use hard solder will be good enough. Regarding the amount of solder, ideally, use just enough to fill the gap, but if you are new to soldering, a little bit more is better than a little bit less. That's because if you have more, you can always remove it, but if you don't have enough, the gap will still be visible after soldering.

Once you have chosen the right solder, you want to put it on the joint.

Let's get back to the ring again. A lot of the time, once the ring is heated up, the water in the flux evaporates. This causes the solder to jump away from where I first place it. A good way to avoid this is to put the solder on the soldering board first, and then put the ring on top. In this way, the solder is being held by the weight of the ring and won't jump away. If your solder comes in the shape of wire, It's not easy to weigh it down when you are making a ring. When this happens, I normally feed the solder wire through my rolling mill to flatten it. Now it's much easier to put my ring on top for soldering. I know you could avoid this problem by simply using solder paste, but here are the two reasons why I try to avoid using solder paste.

First, solder paste has an optimal lifespan of a few months only. You can still use it after the expiry date, but the performance will be reduced. That's because the longer you wait, the drier the paste will become. On the other hand, solid solder doesn't expire. I can keep it in my drawer as long as I want to. Second, when I was pregnant, my supplier asked me to only use the traditional borax cone as flux during my entire pregnancy. So for health and safety reasons, I have been sticking to that ever since. Now the ring, borax, and solder are ready. But I'm still not ready to solder yet, because I need to make the soldering environment safe.

In my case, I have modified an extractor fan to suck air away from my soldering station. I have another video showing you how I make this. Make sure to check that out if you are interested. In an ideal world, The fan would connect to a hole in the wall and the air would go directly outside. But I don't want to drill a hole through my wall, so whenever I solder, I put the air hose out of the window.

This can be a challenge when there is a hurricane outside. To work around it, I try to avoid soldering. In bad weather.

With my extractor on, I first heat up the entire ring by moving my flame around the object a few times. Once the ring turns dark orange for about 3 seconds, in this case, I focus my flame on the joints. This gives a little bit of extra heat to melt my hard solder. You can see the the solder melts and travels upwards to fill up the gap. Once it melts, I normally leave my flame on the joint for another 1 to 2 seconds before turning my torch off. This will make sure my solder is properly settled. After this, I move the ring onto a block of steel to let it cool down to room temperature before putting it on a pickle bath and removing any extra solder if there's any. There is one very important thing I have to point out in this process. Once the ring has been soldered, it will remain hot for some time afterwards, even though the orange color has disappeared. Make sure not to touch it with your bare hands until it has enough time to cool down. To clear the air, I let the extractor run for another 2-5 minutes before turning it off.

Now you know every single step of how to solder. Even for a beginner, as you can see, soldering is not that hard. What I would suggest next is to keep practicing. After doing it a few times, you will feel very comfortable with the process. And start to develop your own preferences. If you like this video, you might also want to check out the one here. It shows what I would do if I were about to learn hand engraving as a beginner. I will see you in the next video.