One side benefit of making jump rings is that you always end up with some scraps of nice clean silver.This picture shows the various stages to go through in order to create usable material from scraps.
1. Collect your scraps, don't mix metals ;-)
2. Melt them in a crucible, a MAPP gas torch works best for this and don't forget to heat up the spout of the crucible, otherwise your metal will cool off before it gets into the mold.
3. Pour the melted silver into the mold to make a shape of silver. My mold has several sizes of rods.
4. Hammer the rod into shape. Make sure to anneal the "blob" several times as you go, otherwise, you'll end up with unusable broken pieces.
5. From the flatten piece, trace some nice straight pieces and cut them with a shear, less material loss this way.
6. Hammer your pieces into the desired shape using a ring mandrel or some steel rod.
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