Jewelry Making

I always find a lot of interesting articles and different entry points into techniques at the Jewelry Making About.com (Tammy Powley runs this). Many times, the articles aren’t about jewelry making techniques that I can use immediately, but nevertheless get me interested and I always file them away to look at later.

This time on the site, she talked a little bit about Using A Soldering Torch for making jewelry. Specifically, about what kinds of torches you might use in order to try this technique out for putting together metal jewelry. I’ve always been interested in perhaps taking a class someday on soldering jewerly. I’ve actually used a propane powered torch many times before, but with a standard tip rather than one meant more exclusively for jewelry. You’re going to laugh, but I actually use a propane torch frequently to take out my broken hockey blades from the metal shaft of the stick. (The torch heats up the glue which enables you to pull out the blade. Yes, hockey and jewelry can coexist…)

One of the main points she tries to make is why you DON’T want to try to use a soldering gun or iron for this type of work. The reason for this is because these type of soldering devices cannot provide the intense heat requirements (over 1000 deg F) required for soldering jewelry.

About.com article on –> What Type of Soldering Torch?

I can sort of echo these sentiments because having an electrical engineering background, I’ve used my share of soldering irons and unless they are extremely large they actually don’t produce a huge amount of continual heat for a long enough time. And actually, they aren’t supposed to because that kind of heat might damage the electronic components you’re soldering together, depending on their tolerances.

Still, it DOES seem sort of scarier to be using a propane torch on tiny pieces of jewelry. One of the things I was wondering about (and I’m sure many others wonder about this as well) was what the tip needs to look like. I found this interesting looking torch tip online called the Little Torch™. It sure looks tiny, and I don’t know anything about it’s effectiveness but the picture does show someone soldering a ring so I assume it’s probably somewhat useful for this type of work.

Most of the torch tips I’ve seen are quite a bit larger than this. There are a huge array of sizes you can get for the tips, but I’d guess for a beginner you want something that isn’t too expensive and allows you control over how much concentrated heat you put in one spot.

Tammy also has this really good step by step article on the basics of Soldering and Jewelry, that I found helpful to see what kind of things you’ll have to prepare for when doing your soldering. The article is here:

Step-by-Step Soldering