Today is the day I resolved to attempt actual silversmithed jewelry. I have the thin strips of fine silver I hammered out previously. I figured the simplest thing I could do with those strips was to make crosses for presents for my wife, her cousin, and her friends.
I tried out a variety of techniques today, but it really wasn’t until the end of the day that I found what worked best for me.
One lesson I certainly learned, was that a butane torch was more than sufficient for fusing small jewelry, especially when used with a fiber-based fusing surface such as are used in kiln work.
I had been more than halfway afraid when viewing others’ on-line chainmaille demonstrations that my pocket torch would only have enough heat to close the gaps in jump rings, but nothing more. I needn’t have worried. So long as the lengths were sufficiently short to prevent heat-sinking through radiation, the silver melted and flowed quite readily, even too readily at times.
The first technique I tried was simply to lay the arms at right angles and see what happened when I applied the torch. This gave me very poor results. One of the shorter arms decided to contract and ball up, and the arms never did fuse with each other.
After thinking it over, I had somewhat better results by deciding to thin the metal with a hammer for each arm at the intended location of the cross intersection, prior to fusing them. I found the results modestly acceptable although unimpressive, because the metal did not completely flow into the gaps around the sides of the intersection. Instead, the arms would simply shrink near the intersection to provide metal for the fusing. So, I used up most of my semi-finished silver practicing joining, in the hopes that it was my handling of the torch which was at fault. Alas, no! My problem was simple physics: I needed to provide more metal to prevent the arms from sacrificing theirs.
A hammer and a piece of steel can be used to hammer a notch in a cross arm.
I had run out of thin strip and only had the wide strip left to play with. I then though of fitting the strips together into a cross like a kindergarten cardboard cutout. So I created notches in each arm of the cross just as if it were cardboard.
Each half of the cross is notched using a Dremel fiber-reinforced cutoff wheel.
The gaps were pretty wide, so I decided to attempt pressing some PMC3 (fine silver clay) which I had on hand for eventual experiments in kiln fusing. I had heard a lot from other people about using fine silver clay as an aid to torch fusing.
The notched halves of the cross are fitted together. PMC3 is applied in the corners to fill the caps in the notches.
Torch fusing using well-mated parts and metal clay worked quite well. The joint was very solid in the intersection, and the PMC flowed into the intersection as predicted. The short arms were still too short and so had melted some, it was but nothing I really couldn’t compensate for later.
A pair of fused crosses using notch connection technique with PMC3 as gap filler.
You can see the difference in the following picture. Along the bottom are crosses I made by simply fusing short of fine silver at right angles, making the arms fit by making them slightly thinner where they meet. It’s okay, but it looks boring. Along the top are crosses I made by notching the arms where they meet and fitting the notches together, along with additional silver to flow into the notches supplied in the form of PMC.
Today's results of fused crosses. Top: notched intersections with PMC3 for gap filler. Bottom: hammered intersections, no gap filler.
The joints in the top row are a lot solider and in my opinion have far higher potential for being more attractive, as you can more clearly see in the next diagram, what I think could be good candidates for earrings and a pendant.
Candidates for future work. top: earrings; bottom: pendant
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