Sunday, August 26, 2012

Lesson Learned - 8/24/12

A neat little trick for soldering on silver-
First heat the joint a little bit, then flux it. Continue to heat it until any excess flux has burned off. Then allow the joint to cool, and use a graphite pencil to color a fairly thick outline of the part you're soldering. In my case, this meant coloring around the S braces and casing brace on a new trumpet leadpipe. Leave a small gap in the graphite where you want your feed point to be. Then proceed with soldering as normal - heat the joint and carefully flow solder in, using only your one feed point. The graphite acts as a barrier to prevent solder from bubbling out of the joint and getting on your otherwise pristine silver plating. Just be aware that if you flux the joint again, it will burn off some of the graphite and leave an opening for solder to escape. It's not a perfect fix, but it worked extremely well for me, and the graphite cleaned up easily. I'm not sure if my success was due to my being extra careful while flowing the solder or adhering closely to the "one feed point only" rule, but the graphite certainly didn't hurt except for adding about a minute of labor to each joint. I imagine it could be even more useful on gold plate, which is more prone than silver to allow solder to flow wantonly.

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