Platinum sterling

[ps_bond]

Does anyone know of a stockist of platinum sterling silver wire in the UK?

[Wallace]

Well, Blow me down with a feather, didn't even know that is such a thing existed. Still I suppose it makes sense given today's market and metal prices.

[ps_bond]

Tarnish resistant, alternative to white gold etc. etc. - but from a hallmarking point of view, I'm not sure about it as there's nothing to differentiate between it & "normal" 925; the price difference is a lot higher than the other tarnish-resistant silvers.

I'm only after fine wire though; I'm told it's particularly effective when laser welding.

[pearlescence]

I assume that what you have in mind is a sort of platinum vermeil. If so it will mark as 925 and you can't solder it normally as the platinum will presumably disappear just like the gold does (as I found out the first and only time I tried!)
I've got some rose gold plated stuff...wonder if anyone has thought of white gold....
I've heard of the platinum but not seen it. I've seen platinum plated finished jewellery. Increasingly popular, along with vermeil, in these money-sensible days

[mizgeorge]

Funnily enough, I was reading up on this (and palladium sterling) only last week. I'm not aware of anyone having it in the UK yet - might be worth contacting ABI and asking them?

Wendy - it's not a plated or bonded metal, it's a new alloy of 92.5% silver, with 1, 3 or 5% platinum and the remaining percentage of copper (with possibly 1% of something else I can't remember offhand!). Apparently it can be milled and worked without annealing as well as being the metal of choice for laser welding.

I suppose you could just make your own Peter?

[ps_bond]

Funnily enough, I was reading up on this (and palladium sterling) only last week. I'm not aware of anyone having it in the UK yet - might be worth contacting ABI and asking them?

Might have to; I've been on their site and only seen the Pd silver, so I'm not sure if they've stopped doing it. Seen some comments against welding Pd itself (as opposed to Pd silver), but nothing terribly empirical. The downside to the newer alloys - they never get much market share, so supply can be tricky, so they get dropped and people go back to old faithful. Is anyone still doing Argentium in the UK? I thought Argex were, but I don't see it.

The Pt silver in (IIRC) 2006 was 10x the cost of sterling.


I suppose you could just make your own Peter?

Could do, but I'm not sure how much sense it makes just for welding wire. That said, I've already concluded it doesn't cost me too much time to draw down already thin wires to what I want - 18K yellow welding wire when I looked was twice the cost of "ordinary" 18K yellow wire.

[SteveLAO]

with regard to hallmarking...you will get the standard 925 for silver with that. Even if you were to have an item part silver and part platinum you would still only get the silver hallmark. The deal with mixed metal marking is that the two metals must be easily identifiable by the man in the street, who clearly wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I've heard of pt silver being used in laser welding too....

[ps_bond]

Thanks Steve - that's rather what I thought. Makes it a hard sell if you can't give much corroboration on why the stuff costs quite so much more.