Jewelry Arts Institute's Student of the Week- Sarina Menassemay

SumoMe

Congratulations to our latest Student of the Week- Sarina Menassemay. She just finished this fantastic ring recently and is submitting it to the latest Lark “500” series of books. This ring is a perfect example of using both wax and metals techniques together to achieve your design goals. I thought we could talk about some silver soldering tips needed to put together a piece like this.

The first thing I tell my students to do when they buy solder is to run it through the rolling mill as far as it will go. A major obstacle to clean soldering is just using too much. If your solder sheet is thick, even a tiny piece has more solder than you think. It is always preferable to use the smallest possible amount and add more if needed. I always pair this with my most trusted soldering friend, paste flux. It acts as glue to hold small balls of solder in place and keeps on working long after liquid flux has given up on you. This is especially vital when repositioning ring shanks or any other tricky soldering. Another tip is to use medium solder whenever feasible instead of easy. We always start with the highest melting , IT when we are using only fine silver and Hard when we are using Sterling. Students always seem to want to get to Easy but it’s name is false advertising. Easy solder has the highest amount of Zinc of all the solders and is the least controllable or predictable. Medium solder can be used repeatedly with only a small risk of re-flow, which can easily be controlled using heat sinks or messy but effective ochre. I can only really recommend Easy for putting on posts and it is a pretty lukewarm recommendation. Sarina did a beautiful job of soldering her piece and a beautiful job on the rest of it, too. Well done!