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Hi all,
I'm making wedding bands out of a meteorite. I'm about done forging the bars, so I'm almost ready to start shaping. I've got rods for each of the ring sizes to bend the bars around, but I'm unsure as to what solder would be best to use to close the ends.
The meteorite is about 92% iron, 8% nickel with some other trace bits. I'm thinking silver solder would probably blend the best, but I don't know anything so my opinion isn't worth much! Can anyone offer any advice what to use? Thanks.
I know nothing about this but would that not be a welding job and not a soldering if it's predominantly iron? My other thought from a female point of view and is only a thought, might there not be a reaction to the skin with iron and nickel for everyday use
Any silver solder would do the trick, with borax as a flux.
However as mentioned by Caroline your metal might well be allergenic and once a person is sensitised they will react badly to all sorts of metal objects including handles, cases and key pads. Dennis.
my penneth... meteorite tarnishes and rusts. the silver solder would show up once the meteorite starts to change colour.
Any allergy issues aside, don't do what I did and forget that the meteorite needs to be marked as '+Metal' when hallmarked! I'm really interested how you formed the rods (if you don't mind sharing)
I've a desk full of meteorite fragments and tektites as have been using them in some resin filled pieces recently.
Thanks for the replies. Silver it is then! I think I've got some borax lying around to use with it. My other half has iron and nickel jewelry so there shouldn't be any allergy problems, and since they're for us there's no hallmarking needed either.
LydiaNiz, I've done it by hand so far. I cast my own forge into a 25L oil drum, filled and surrounded it with bricks and got some Zoeller burners to use in it. I drew the rods out from slices of the meteorite sample with heating and hammering. I've never done any of this so everything took at least 10x longer than it would take a professional, but I wanted to do it myself, and it's been fascinating.
Could you show us a picture of the finished piece please, personally I would use brass solder (melting temperature of over 1000c)
Carlton
I could only show you pictures of a couple of unfinished bars at the moment. Wouldn't brass solder be a different colour?
Yep! the join would be a dull copper colour ..... CarltonQuote:
Originally Posted by electricaltill
I was going to post an image of one of the slices, but the board won't let me yet. The slices I've used so far have been silver in cross-section. I'm assuming after finishing it would be approximately that colour, so I don't think brass solder would match would it? Or are you suggesting a sufficiently narrow join would be invisible?