Silver solder

Interesting, I am actually formulating a silver solder for jewelers using organic binders that burn off completely at different temperatures depending on the formulation. Jewelers use solders that melt at different temperatures. In this way they are able to first solder a ring together with hard solder that melts at high temp. Then solder a bezel cup onto the ring using a softer medium solder that melts at a lower temp. This way when soldering a bezel onto a ring the solder that holds the ring together does not melt, because the medium solder melts before the hard. Depending on what the binders are in your flux, it might make it more simple, or more difficult to recover the silver. Also depending on the temp the solder melts may make a difference.

What color is the flux, is it white, or a pale yellow? When silver is alloyed with other metals, it sometimes will turn a yellow hue as it ages, this is why silver jewelry is often plated with Rhodium, and why people take their silver jewelry to be rhodium plated at a jeweler from time to time. Where the solder joints exist, the joints will start to turn a yellow color, or sometimes a pinkish color over time.

If you do decide to sell the flux, please do not to a large refiner. Even if they do take it, they are not tooled up to refine this type of material. Their melt loss will be far greater than someone able to process it properly, and will give you only a minimal return.

An interesting problem to say the least.

As a side note, I will be adding to by profile at some point. I now make custom jewelery out of some of the metals I recover and refine. I have been making alloys for jewelers, some unique like silver/palladium alloys. The metals jewelers use have small amounts of impurities specially in karat gold and sterling silver. I refine to high purity, and only alloy with metals I have personally refined so my impurities are brought drastically down to .001 of the total. When I refine jewelry I retain the stones and re-use them in the jewelery I design and make. For expensive stones I have them GIA certified. The concept is to take recycled metals and stones, and turn them into something special all the way from one end of the process to the other. This isn't a sales pitch, at least not yet. If interested or curious I will be adding to my profile as I said, with pictures etc. This will not be for a few months yet, as I am already swamped with requests, and I want to put up a website prior to actually offering this service.



Scott