Today we will be tackling soldering and polishing. This will be a rather lengthy one so strap in.
Soldering is when you take solder which is a combination of metal elements, heat it up, and reshape it most of the time to cover something or use as a connector. Soldering for jewelry is is taking solder wire and running it over the copper foil to give a beautiful silver shine as well as be able to attach thing to it like wire and jump rings to turn it into something functional and wearable.
When soldering/poliching you will need several materials:
- Lead-free solder (I suggest nickel free as well)
- Flux
- Q-tips
- Forceps
- Jump rings and other decorations
- Helping hands (optional but highly recommended)
- Clean cloth
- Soft bristle toothbrush
- Soft paint brush
You begin by plugging in your soldering iron, which turns it on. While it’s warming, please keep it in a safe spot on you soldering mat (rubber mat meant to withstand high temperatures) but away from your arms so you don’t accidently touch it. You can get you Q-tip nice and wet with flux and cover all the copper foil with it. It’s messy but it preps and cleans the copper foil and without it you will have a hard time getting the solder to stick. Don’t be shy with it.
Once your piece is prepared, check your soldering iron by pressing the tip against you soldering wire to see if it melts it. If it does easily, it’s ready, if not, wait a little longer or you might have to turn the heat up. Too hot and the solder will turn kind of a burnt color like copper.
You can find what method here works best for you when applying the solder to the foil. You can either gather a big glob on the edge of your tip and run it along the foil before gathering another and doing it again or you can work to hold the wire in one hand and the soldering iron in the other. You go along feeding the solder to the soldering iron in tandem. I personally have a hard time doing that, but it’s a lot easier and faster if you can do it. Tip: The important thing here is to make sure you don’t go over the same spot over and over because the heat breaks down the sticky adhesive on the tape. You will see it because it turns black and seeps out.
Cover all the copper tape with solder. Now it’s time to add decorations, which I will discuss more in length about in step 6. Adding the jump ring or rings to it is easy especially if you have a tool called helping hands which has little claps that can hold both you jump ring in place and your glass in place while flux, then add a dab of solder to bind it together. TIP: If you have an open jump ring, solder the slit opening down to the piece effectively closing it.
Take a moment to really wipe off all the flux and clean up the piece with a cloth.
And your done. Next, we will move on to polishing.
Polishing with carnauba wax helps to preserve the life of the solder. You simply take a brush and cover the whole thing with the wax and let it dry which I usually let sit overnight. Sometimes I will flip it to make sure both sides are good and dry.
Then you take a soft cloth and wipe away all the white excess wax. Be thorough. Use a very soft fine toothbrush to get any nooks such as around the creases and decorations in hard to reach places.
Now you have a completed piece you can be proud of that you created from start to finish.
Tomorrow we will look at prepping you piece to get it listed on a site such as Etsy.
Thank you so much for stopping by and I hope you found this useful. Please like and subscribe to my website. Have a blessed day.
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