I hope you like listening to me talk about metal. Buy one here: www.etsy.com/listing/98203781... Here I forge a pure silver bangle and talk about stuff that goes wrong. This 99.9% silver bracelet is meant for an etsy client.
I love the fact that you showed how to do this with minimal purpose made tools. For a beginner or someone wanting to know the process, we don't have thousands of dollars to shell into a hobby right away. At its most basic... silver, hammer, anvil, heat, and water. From that you can honestly make the bracelet and once that's down you just add on new simple things until you master it.
I know it's been 3 years but i hope you're pouring ingots by now. My dad was a jeweler and i found his scrap tin after he passed. I bought the tools on Amazon and ebay and practiced on scrap jewelry and now I'm pouring great. I was gonna surprise my sister with a pendant like you said at the beginning, but the scrap ended up being more than expected so i 2 sided taped the bars and buttons inside the Altoids tin and taped it to a picture frame filled with pics of me and our father. You're definitely intelligent, attentive, and patient enough to make good pours. Thanks for the info.
I've just now been pouring rough ingots which have been... good enough. I still like running the torch with my charcoal block for most things though. Thank you for the kind words, I hope your projects are fun and successful!!
FINALLY! I've been searching you tube for 3 days to find out how to hammer pure silver! Thank you so much. Now I can go attempt my first "hammer time". "Can't touch this." :)
I'm glad you finally found it! Good luck with your project, try to be fearless, silver teaches good lessons. Try not to burn your fingers as much as I did the first few times, and wear eye protection! You're going to love it.
My pepetools mill has made me money by saving me time. I bet the cheap blue cast mills are fine, but if youre trying to run a business, I would shell out the cash for a pepetools or durston! I looked at the cast iron Mills for a good long time. Buy the tools you need!
I admit, hot working would technically be less hammering and annealing cycles, but I would lose a significant portion of the precision that cold working allows. Most likely I would burn my hands and get a boo-boo and then I would be sad.
You should thank me lol. Seems like this bracelet is proving to be pretty popular 😊 I noticed that a few people have purchased it. I may buy the hammered version at some point.
I honestly didn't know this. I looked it up, and I guess people have done quite a bit of research on this topic. I thought the structures were a dissimilarly cooling molten core spitting up like a volcano from earth's crust. "It has been known for a long time that molten silver will absorb oxygen from the air and will “spit” on solidification." royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1926.0128
Unfortunately, I would lean more towards the hypothesis that your 24k gold has received some love (scratches) from the outside world. Depending on how intricate your ring is, I would recommend bringing it to a jeweler and asking them to burnish it back to a brilliant shine. Burnishing will just mush around the gold on the surface; the scratches will be filled in by the gold nearby, without removing any gold. The next step would be to polish, which does remove gold from the surface. I would always try to burnish before polishing! Most local goldsmiths will be happy to help for a very small price. If your ring isn't scratched, and it is dirty, I recommend dawn ultra dish soap and an old extra-soft toothbrush. Give it some love and rinse in hot water.