Photo by Justin Heininger © 2023 : beneaththemountains.com
Well, it’s happened. Autumn is officially here. I have mixed feelings. I love summertime in Vermont, but at the same time, the autumn leaves in Vermont are often spectacular. We’ll see what all that rain does to the fall foliage. As of today, the leaves where I am are just barely beginning to change, which feels slightly later than the past few years. I’ll take it. We’ve earned a mild fall after all the crazy rain in Vermont.
Questions Answered
This week, I thought I would have to dig deep to answer a question related to silversmithing. Until someone asked about sweat soldering on one of my recent Instagram posts! Yay!
If you have a question, please contact me and ask away. Yeah, that means you! If you want to know something about jewelry, please ask. I may not know the answer, which is actually a good thing because I’ll take time in my crazy life to find an answer for you and then write about it. I mean, really, how cool is that?
So, this week, after posting a picture on Instagram where I mentioned that I had sweat soldered a design onto a backing to create a pendant, one of my followers asked, “what is sweat soldering?”
Well, I’m tempted to say that sweat soldering is when you have a really difficult piece to solder together and it makes you so nervous that you sweat a lot. Haha.
Seriously though. Sweat soldering is a technique where you don’t actually solder your work together. At first anyway. Sweat soldering is actually a lamination technique used in fine metals construction. By that I mean, you’re soldering together two pieces of (usually flat) metal where one piece has been cut and/or pierced to create a design and then soldered onto a backing.
Because of the shape and/or size of the materials being soldered together just placing solder around the edge often isn’t enough to achieve a bond across the entire surface. In other words, you may end up with solder around the edges, but if the piece is large enough then you won’t actually get surface adhesion across both pieces. When that happens it means that you end up with little hollow spaces between the two pieces. That isn’t really a huge deal IF you intend on leaving the piece flat. It will create an annoying hollow sound though, and we want our finished jewelry to act and sound as if it is one solid piece.
In order to achieve that, a jeweler flows solder across one side of the flat “design” piece (the one cut out) first, so that it can then be soldered to the backing material. By soldering two pieces together in this fashion, the solder will flow in between both sheets of metal, and when well done, it essentially becomes one piece of metal. This allows you to further shape the piece and the metal will behave as one solid piece, albeit with varying thicknesses throughout.
Cool, huh?
Here’s the caveat: It takes a lot of practice to figure out how much solder to use so that you don’t get it all over where you don’t want it to go. Some designs can be ruined when the solder flows during this process because you can’t remove it once it flows where you don’t want it. Then that piece is essentially bound for the smelter. There are ways to salvage some of the material to make other things, but unless you’re in the smelting business you can’t verify the quality of the materials due to the solder that you’ve added.
Do you care? Maybe not. Think of all the time that the jeweler may have spent creating a beautiful bracelet or pendant only to have to start all over again.
Yeah. Bummer. (and no, you can’t charge for that mistake)
News of late
- I’m finishing up a commissioned order for a pendant design that I originally created for a cuff bracelet. It’s coming along well and should be complete.
- Can we find that guy Murphy and just do away with him already? If you don’t know who Murphy is, you lead a very blessed life and I take my hat off to you!
- I was asked if I could repair a sterling silver necklace. Something I don’t usually do for things I haven’t personally created. After some research, I think I may have found all the necessary materials which will allow me to fix it AND make it a little longer, as requested by the owner.
In the Works
- Still working on moving my website
- This is a real bear for me. I usually have more “free” time to work on this at night. Unfortunately, that’s also when I’m tired and it isn’t the best time for me to be learning how to work within a new user interface.
- Working on finding companies that might be able to engrave some of my designs for me.
- I contacted a big company (in the USA) but I have yet to hear back from them, which is a bit discouraging because they state on their website that they do “small” stuff all the way up to manufacturing jewelry based on initial designs. I’m definitely going to keep that wheel squeaking, but it might be a while until they decide the noise is annoying enough for them “to oil.”
- Going to begin creating some of my designs without turning them into vector art first.
That's it for this week.
Happy Fall everyone,
Justin