Subject: Soldering Gold Fill

From: [email-masked] (Ray)
Date: 13 Dec 1996 02:27:35 GMT

Hard soldering gold fill is a little tricky because of firescale. We use a lot 
of gold fill material and solder intricate pieces with NO firescale and very 
little cleanup. First and for most you need a good flux, see formula below.

Dip the piece(s) to be soldered in the alachol flux - place them on your 
solder block and burn off the alachol. Next heat the pieces just a little and 
apply more flux (water base), heat - flux, heat - flux, until the entire piece 
is white. Use only extra easy 8K solder made especially for gold fill 
material. If you don't over heat the metal it will not have any firescale and 
only requires light buffing with rouge.

Ranson
http://www.ro.com/av/gems

We start with Denatured Alchol about 4oz then add 2T of boric acid and 2T of 
boraz. Put the liquid in a small glass bottle and loosely capit. Place in a 
pan of water on the stove and heat to just below the boiling point. Stur the 
liquid until the alachol is completely saturated. When finished there should 
be some borax left in the bottom, if not you did'nt put enough in. So put some 
more in and heat again.

Next we make another flux with distiled water instead of alachol, using the 
same process as above.

We then dip the entire piece in the flux, set on the solder block and burn off 
the alachol. Then only add a very small ammount of the water flux on the join.

Ranson
http://www.ro.com/av/gems