Making “acorns” or little silver spheres.

I made some spheres this morning, melting small lengths of silver wire into a hole in a piece of charcoal. In a bit of a daze after a good meal and wine last night I held the torch on the sphere for longer than I usually do. I was delighted that once I used the sphere on a piece I was making and polished it , there appeared to be a ring of copper around the base. I assume that in heating it as long as I did, the copper in the silver separated out....yes? It looks great reflected in the polished surface around it. Just hope I can do this to order.


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That's a bit of a mystery, because copper and silver do not separate when melting sterling. Could be that you plated the piece by grasping it with steel tweezers? Then when polishing, the mop could not reach into the base of the ball.

By the way, to get balls all the same size, when melting into into holes in a block, you can use small jump rings rather than wires. Dennis.

Thanks Dennis! Mystery solved....looks good anyhow. I cut snippets of waste silver and weighed them using my “Myco” mini scales. 0.4 gram gave a diameter of about 4.4 mm tho not a true sphere, slightly squashed from pole to pole with a convenient flatish South Pole.


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Ah a drug dealers balance. I used mine for weighing out 5% accelerator for my acrylic glue, but it began to fail after six moths.
Now I have this Tuff Weigh, intended to weigh gun pellets, for reasons that escape me. Dennis.

Used purely for weighing bits of silver, I assure you!

Mine is very unsophisticated and simple, but so far so good.


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"for reasons that escape me. Dennis", much quicker than counting them.