Good day to everyone reading this and greetings from Finland! I am a 36yo sort of "jack of all trades" craftsman (read; know how to make many things, expert in none of them) and wish to take on a new challenge of making silver jewelry at home, namely rings but possibly others later as well. I've made a lot of stuff over the years spanning from electric guitars to award winning motorbikes to bows, some wood some metal but my work has always lacked the finesse of a jeweler which is the reason I want to try and learn new skills to better myself as an artisan. I have some experience of jewelry making, namely jump ring bracelets etc as a teen, I actually started making a traditional chainmaille bear hunter shirt once but after getting about an A4 paper sheet's worth done the piece was submitted to a local crafts exhibition to be on display, and during the disassembly of the display some individual of questionable morale took it upon themselves to relieve me of the possession of said piece which pretty much killed the buzz enough that I never got to start over. Many would propably recommend me to take a course which I'd love to do alas being a private contractor with two small boys and a wife with a three shift nursing job, added with the covid shutting down all courses attending one has proved quite impossible so my main source of information has of late been the youtube channel At The Bench by Andrew Berry which has proven quite useful so far. I have never soldered silver in my life but have done brazing and own both MIG and TIG rigs so manipulating metal is no stranger to me, but as said I need to hone my skills to develope the finesse needed for this.

Quite the ramble there. Still reading? Here's a couple newbie questions:

If I am to make silver rings, what sort of raw material am I to purchase? Is Fully annealed too soft? What would you recommend?

I have ideas about making rings that are part silver part wood, what glue would you recommend to use? I have gorilla glue urethane glue, and access to different 2k epoxies. I've seen someone use CA glue but as the contact surface will be quite small I'm unsure if I'd trust superglues.

Andrew seems to be using borax as the flux. I cannot find any locally but I'm probly making an order from the shop on this site at some point and they seem to carry it. I dabbed into tiffany glassworks some time ago of which ai have a vile of yellow fluid flux that seems to work wonders when doing electric soldering work on the previously mentioned motorbikes. I have zero idea what precisely that bottle contains, would you reckon that same stuff could work with soldering silver?

I'm sure many newbie questions will arise as the journey kicks off, more of those as they come.

Thanks!