Is soldering gold the same as soldering silver?

Hi,

I think I'm pretty confident with soldering silver - making rings, pendants etc. I use silver solder paste.

My question is, do you solder gold the same way as you solder silver using gold solder paste? I'd like to delve into gold but I don't really know if you work with it the same way as silver?

Would love to be pointed in teh right direction :)

Have you ever tried soldering with the traditional method of small solder pieces and a flux? I have never used solder paste and have never seen any necessity to use it. For silver soldering I use hard and easy silver solder with a plain borax cone and dish for fluxing. For gold I use whatever carat solder needed and have it in hard, medium and easy solders. I also use borax as my flux for gold soldering.
The photos show my method of soldering an oval bezel setting to it's backplate, using hard silver solder and borax flux.

James

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Agree with James. Having always used sheet solder and borax, I thought I'd give solder paste a try, both silver and 9ct. Probably in my case "old dogs and new tricks" as I really couldn't get on with paste.

I've been using the silver paste for chain work, but nothing else.

I'm the opposite. I use paste for just about everything - it's quicker and more convenient, as well as a lot less messy and I have to be able to churn stuff out pretty quickly. Most of my peices are relatively small though. I do use conventional solder for some jobs, but only rarely now, and I tend to prefer solder wire to snipping up panels.

I also happily use gold solder paste - though only in the smallish range of pastes I have (9ct and 18ct yellow and white in hard and easy). I have inherited enough panels of other types of gold solder to last for a fairly long time, and would probably only replace the ones I use most with paste - simply because of the risk of paste drying out given how rarely I use them!