-How to Make Soldered Jewelry, Episode #2 - Sweat Soldering and Annealing Metal, Beaducation.com.

Hey there! I'm Lisa Nimminkelly for BeEducation.com and welcome to the first project episode in our Introduction to Soldering series. Now if you haven't watched the very first episode, that's where we talk about tools and materials and we really get into it. So make sure you check that out before this one. But in this one, we're going to talk about sweat soldering. And that is when you take two flat pieces of metal and solder them together. In that first episode, we talk about the golden rules of soldering and one major golden rule is to make sure that your metals are totally touching. The solder will only connect where it's touching. And because of that, in this episode, we also talk about annealing. And annealing is when your metal is really hard, hit it with a torch like I'm going to show you, and it relaxes it. Now the reason I put those two together is because in this class, when we go to put the two pieces together, one is a little bit warped. So you have to flatten it. And it was pretty hard and I couldn't get it to flatten. So I kneeled the metal and then it easily flattened. So we're going to talk about sweat soldering. We're going to talk about annealing. But the first thing we're going to do is just flow solder. We're not going to solder anything together. We're just going to put some solder on some copper and see what it feels like and what it looks like to just get it up to temperature and let it flow. We're going to practice just flowing the solder. And throughout these lessons, we're going to be using a spray-on flux, but I thought for fun I'd show you the Handy Flux, which comes on more like a paste. Mine is kind of old, so it's really thick, but you can water it down and apply it with a brush or with this. For this, I'm just going to put it on a small amount of area. And then I'm going to apply and place my little pallion. Boop! And then we're just going to melt that and see what it looks like just flowing. So again, this is something I want you to do over and over again just to get a feel for how hot it needs to be. My flame is about two inches above the piece and I'm just hitting the outside. And there goes the flux. It's going to turn a little glassy. Just hit the outside of the metal because the heat will travel in. It's going to flow pretty soon. Starting to go. You see that? There it goes. You can see how quickly it flows and this will all depend on how high you have your flame, how thick your metal is. And this is really interesting because you can see the bright copper color. That's where the flux was because it protected it from the copper oxides coming up and it kept it nice copper color. And the outside got the fire scale which is very easy to clean up in the pickle. Here's some fun pieces that have been sweat soldered. This is just a basic sterling stamped piece that we soldered a little brass heart on. Super cute. This is a copper piece. We have the initials and then the middle S there is brass. It's been soldered on and actually it was a charm. We cut the top off of it and filed it off just to use it as a singular S. It's kind of cute. And on this one, we used the sterling silver circle in the back and then copper heart sterling K. So you could solder the copper heart on first, clean it, start all over again to then put the K on in two steps with two different flow solders. But on this one, I actually used medium solder, laid it between the copper heart and the sterling back and then laid the K right on top of it with medium solder. Everything stayed really well and I just soldered it all at once and it worked out great. Okay, so here's my plan. On this beautiful little stamped circle, I want to solder this heart right in the middle. It's a crazy reflection there. But they need to be flat so that they can get a good join and you can see they don't touch because this guy's pretty warped and that happens when you stamp, especially around the outside. So all you need to do is flatten it. Sometimes you need to anneal it to get the metal to really flatten, but I'm hoping that I can just use my plastic mallet or a rawhide mallet and hammer it to flat. So you need to make sure that your bench block is super clean and smooth with no nicks in it. Mine is very clean. It's just got a little rust, but that doesn't matter. So I could just flip it down and hit it with the plastic mallet because this is clean, but if you're worried about your bench block, grab like a thin piece of fabric or I just have some leather here and you can put it on that to make sure you don't scratch up your piece. Now you're going to have an easier time flattening it by facing the edges down this way rather than having them point up like that, if that makes sense. So I'm just going to flip it down and hit it a bunch of times. Now because this is sterling, it's a pretty hard metal, I'm not really able to get it very flat. I could keep trying, but I actually want to show you annealing, so I'm going to leave it at that. If I was able to get it flat and get this flat, we could move straight on to soldering. But instead, let me teach you how to anneal this metal to soften it so that then when I try to flatten it again, it'll easily, easily flatten. To anneal this metal, these are the tools and all the goodies that you need from your soldering list that we talked about in the first lesson. And the only reason we've got our cupronil here, which is a flux, is not because we need it to help our solder flow, because we're not soldering just yet, but by spraying it on this piece before we anneal, it's going to help protect it from the fire scale. So really what it means is it's going to be less cleaning after we anneal this piece. On this one, I am going to use the flux that we talked about to keep it from getting too much fire scale, but I'm not going to do it on this one, just so you can see the difference. Cool. So I'm going to turn on my flame. I've got my goggles on. Maybe I'm not going to turn my flame. There we go. And I want my flame, let me come in here, you can't see really well, but I've got it a little pulled back. I don't have it full max, you can tell by the sound, or I'll show you the button as well. I don't have it turned all the way up there. I have it pulled back a little bit, so it's not like a crazy big flame. I want a neutral flame. And to add the cupronil, I'm just going to get it a little bit warm, and maybe I'll do the other side as well. See how it's already changing colors, pulling those copper oxides up to the surface. All right. So I'm going to come in with my flame, and again, because of the contrast, you can't really see it, but see how it's changing colors here, and it's starting to get almost kind of pinky, salmon-y color. You don't want to come in too close. Just come around and around. You want to be very deliberate and very patient, and maybe we're done there. Now I'm going to do this guy, and I'm kind of covering it with the torch, but same thing. I want to get it pretty warm, but not red, and that looks good. Okay. I'm going to quench it, and do the same with this guy. I'm going to scoot him to the edge so I can grab it out of frame, sorry, and you'll hear the crunch sound. Yeah! All right. So let me take them out and show you. So now I'm going to put it in the pickle to clean it up, or hit it with a bunch of Penny Bright, and then we'll come back and flatten it again. I just grabbed these out of the pickle pot, and they will come out looking like this, kind of matte, kind of white, chalky. That's because it's all clean. The copper oxides are gone. The silver's come to the surface, and I'm not going to polish it. I'm going to leave it just like that. I'm going to flatten it, and then I can solder it because it's all clean. So don't polish it. Just leave it exactly like this. Let's see. The heart is already pretty flat. I probably don't need to flatten it, but I'm going to leave the design face up and just give it a couple whacks, just to make sure. All right. Now with this guy, instead of flipping it over, I'm just going to hit it from the front because it's super annealed, so it's very soft. Everybody should go flat without any issue. If you want, you can try to flatten like that, but don't hit your hand. And there we go. Before I go ahead and solder this, I wanted to show you that this is what you're looking for, nice and flat, flat, flat against each other. It's just like we talked about when we introduced you to sheet solder. We're going to cut these little pieces of grass. It could probably go a little longer. And then we're going to cut our own little pallions here and then drop them into our little jar to keep them. See, we've got them right there in our little jar. We'll just pull them out as we need them. Here's how I'm going to do this. I'm going to first come in with my torch and lightly heat this. These two pieces are 24 gauge. They're pretty thin. Lightly heat, spray with Cupernyl, and get it all nice and coated, and then I'm going to turn my torch off and then place everything in place, then turn it back on and solder. Try and get that all nice and coated, like that. I'm actually just going to use one pallion because I cut this guy kind of big and it's kind of perfect. So, I'm now going to take my heart, flip it upside down, try to get it nice and centered right where I want it. Just make sure that it's right exactly where I want it. And the cool thing is here, the pallion has it kind of lifted. You can't really see it, but there's a gap over here. But when it solders, the heart will drop, like, and that is when I'll know that it is all soldered. This is where patience comes in. I'm slowly going to heat the outside. I'm not going to concentrate my flame right in the middle. I'm just going to let the heat flow in from the outside. Very patient. My flux will protect it. I'm going to come in a little hotter. It's probably going to drop pretty soon. I can see it coming up to red. And do you see that drop right there? I'm just going to give it a little bit of a kiss around the outside. Okay, I realized you couldn't see the drop because the torch was in the way. So I've set up just another sample here. I've got my torch on. Everything is fluxed. And I'm heating around the edge, coming around and around. The heat will travel in from the edge. I'm not trying to hit too hard on the top. Just slowly heating. It's getting up to temperature. You can see it drop right there. And the other side needs to go. There it goes. And then you see that little silver flash around the edge? That's what we're looking for. So we just pulled it out of the pickle pot. And there's that kind of white, frosty finish that we talked about. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and oxidize it. And then polish it up to leave the black in the grooves to show the detail of the stamping. I'm going to do that instead of polishing it, then oxidize and polishing again. So you can oxidize with your oxidation of choice. Whether you moxidize with Sharpie pen or enamel paint or liver sulfur or hydrochloric acid. Whichever you prefer. I'm going to go ahead off camera and oxidize, polish, punch a hole, and bring it on back. And you're going to see this beauty. I am also going to file that because it's making me crazy. A little bump right there. Look at this. Not too scary. You guys can do this. It's all nice and soldered. I have oxidized and polished it. That's why my hands are all dirty. And hung it from my favorite popcorn chain. So, it's your turn. What do you say? Let's go fire up those torches and make yourself a nice, wet, soldered pendant. Here we go. Hey. You can stop it now.