In my last post, I showed the Gold and Sterling Silver kinetic earrings I made. While cleaning up after that project I thought of making bi-metal one. Instead of each side being a different metal, each side would be 2 metals and when soldered into the bead, there would be an appearance of a checkerboard because the bi-metal seams would be rotated 90 degrees from each other.
I started with Copper and Yellow brass. Nice clean edges that were flush and soldered with hard solder. Again I used a circle template I made to put the drill holes on each side of the seam. Holes drilled and then the disk cutter punched the disks out. I did an anneal and deburred the holes. Next was the dapping block and I first went into a shallow dapping hole. Then the disks were moved to a deeper hole and that when the seam gave way. I tried a sample without drilling that I even annealed a second time and the seam failed also. I asked in a FB metals group and I was convinced that brass was not going to work since it is a harder metal than pure copper (which I knew). The hive mind consensus was to try copper and sterling silver - which I was going to do eventually but wanted to perfect the process with a less expensive material but at this point I had nothing to loose.
I went through my silver scrap and found pieces of sheet that would work but needed to be rolled a bit thinner. So I started over again. Everything was going well until I went to solder the first bead together. I used cross locking tweezers and my mini-torch with oxy/propane.... the bi-metal seams gave way probably due to the pressure of the tweezers AND the OXY/propane getting the bead too hot. Luckily I had cut enough disks for THREE beads just incase. On the second bead I used T-pins to hold the bead in alignment and used by hand held butane torch which would take longer to heat up the bead and melt the easy solder but there was *almost* no chance of melting the hard solder. I took it real slow and after an hour both beads were soldered and pickled. Then it was time to polish and mount on ear wires.
The completed earrings are the very last picture!
I started with Copper and Yellow brass. Nice clean edges that were flush and soldered with hard solder. Again I used a circle template I made to put the drill holes on each side of the seam. Holes drilled and then the disk cutter punched the disks out. I did an anneal and deburred the holes. Next was the dapping block and I first went into a shallow dapping hole. Then the disks were moved to a deeper hole and that when the seam gave way. I tried a sample without drilling that I even annealed a second time and the seam failed also. I asked in a FB metals group and I was convinced that brass was not going to work since it is a harder metal than pure copper (which I knew). The hive mind consensus was to try copper and sterling silver - which I was going to do eventually but wanted to perfect the process with a less expensive material but at this point I had nothing to loose.
I went through my silver scrap and found pieces of sheet that would work but needed to be rolled a bit thinner. So I started over again. Everything was going well until I went to solder the first bead together. I used cross locking tweezers and my mini-torch with oxy/propane.... the bi-metal seams gave way probably due to the pressure of the tweezers AND the OXY/propane getting the bead too hot. Luckily I had cut enough disks for THREE beads just incase. On the second bead I used T-pins to hold the bead in alignment and used by hand held butane torch which would take longer to heat up the bead and melt the easy solder but there was *almost* no chance of melting the hard solder. I took it real slow and after an hour both beads were soldered and pickled. Then it was time to polish and mount on ear wires.
The completed earrings are the very last picture!
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