The Colour Of Solder.

[Dennis]

Increasingly craft jewellers are turning to base metals for their work, but this raises the question of the colour of their solder.

Rio Grande have a brass coloured solder, in both paste and strip, which they say is a good match for brass, bronze and gold filled. It does seem awfully expensive. But by their own admission, their copper solder to date is a dull grey colour.

I have read that seams of silver solder can be disguised on copper, by tying some iron binding wire around the finished piece and dropping it into pickle. So I made up a test ring from four strands of copper wire, soldered together for the shank and added a copper dome.

My first picture shows the newly made test piece, liberally splashed with solder, straight from its pickle. Picture two, shows the piece polished with Radial Disks, but no effort made to file off the unwanted solder.

The ring was then dropped back into the pickle bath for twenty minutes, with some binding wire. It came out amazingly dark but was revived with the finest Radial Disk applied gently. The result is shown in picture three.

Conclusions:
The patches of solder were partially disguised by plating, but the resulting piece remained a little darker for it.
It might be worth doing in some circumstances, but if you then add metal decorations of another colour and re-pickle, the effect will be lost.
The pickle remains unharmed once the iron has been removed. Dennis.

[ps_bond]

I have some phos-copper brazing rods that I've tried on copper; they don't match exactly (gives a slightly grey copper colour too), but they're closer than silver solder. The flipside is that it doesn't flow as well as hard solder, has a pretty high melting point and cleaning it up afterwards is not so much fun - it is harder than the copper. A partial solution at best.

I've tried the plating option too - it is a very thin coating and wears off quickly (enthusiastic polishing can do it). I keep meaning to try electroplating it, but I need to get a round tuit.