Casting Silver Scraps...

Well we finished another project this week.  So it's time to collect the scraps of silver from around the shop and cast some silver rods.

I use a ceramic crucible that I previously treated with flux to form a nice coat of glass on the surface.  I use a MAPP gas torch as it produces more heat and enough BUTs to melt the silver.

Once the silver has melted and forms a nice silver sphere in the crucible, it is ready to pour into the mold.  I need to keep the flame just in front of the silver as I tilt slowly the crucible to pour. 

This ensures that the spout of the crucible is warm and does not cool-off the silver before it enter the mold.  You want to pour the silver quickly but smoothly into the mold.  This prevents trapping air into the pour and make an even density cast.

I let things cool down for a few minutes, then I opened the mold and there it is a nice rod of silver. 

Making a Ring from Scratch... or is that Scrap ?

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.