Everything You Need To Know To Make Your Own Sterling Silver 925

so in this video i'll be showing you how to make your own sterling silver using fine silver and go through all the math and make it as easy as possible to understand and to do on your own so let's get started [Music] so it looks like i have a lot of stuff going on here but these coins and stuff right here are not part of actually making your own sterling these just happen to be an example of ways to get material so these pennies right here are actually 95 copper basically all american pennies that were made in 1982 and back are made out of 95 copper anything newer is made out of zinc it's like 97 zinc and just copper plated so these quarters are actually 90 silver which is only two percent off from being sterling silver and you can melt these down and use them in jewelry just make sure that you mark them properly because they are not technically sterling american quarters were made out of silver i believe up into 1964 but i'll put the proper date on the screen now seeing that i don't know off the top of my head but i know all these are silver for sure so with all that being said these are actually fine silver or pure silver bars and coins and then you can also get a silver shot like this this is actually the best thing to melt because it has a bigger surface area and that allows more heat to go into everything and melt down faster so bars and coins are a another common way to get your fine silver but you do have to cut it up or you should cut it up before trying to melt it another thing you're going to need is pure copper make sure that it is actually in 99 copper some copper wire and stuff like that has lead or other additives in it so make sure when you buy copper it is pure and you can cut it up into smaller pieces like this or you can even buy it in shot forms or just chip forms and it's usually pretty cheap so you might be wondering why would you even mix copper with pure silver anyways why not just use pure silver it'd probably be better well it's really soft actually and it scratches really easily and can be bent really easily so when you add just enough copper to it it will strengthen it and make it into an alloy instead of just a pure element basically the copper works together with it to strengthen it and that's why sterling silver is used in most jewelry cutlery and stuff like that because it is stronger you can make stuff out of just pure silver if you want to it will be a lot softer and it's going to get scuffed up and scratched really easily though but if you want to you can and i've seen some amazing looking things made out of just pure silver so before we go any further on this i have to talk about the sponsor of this video so i thought skillshare would be a fitting sponsor for my channel seeing that you come here to learn stuff and skillshare is a community for learning and just like with my videos you can learn at your own pace and one of the things i really like about it is every class is project oriented so you're working towards a goal and not just learning random skills so you'll actually have something by the end of it so if you are wanting to start out learning some stuff about fusion 360 i suggest kevin kennedy he has a three-part class that takes you from installing the program to getting just about all of the basics down also be sure to check out vladimir mariano he has a bunch of classes on 3d printing and how to think in the terms of actually printing out objects along with teaching you how to use fusion 360 as well so the first 1000 people to click the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium this gives you full access to the entire catalog that skillshare has to offer and after that skillshare is as low as 10 a month with an annual subscription so thank you skillshare for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel so let's actually start making our sterling you're going to need a scale that has very small units so ounces grams and stuff like that and i'm going to tear this which basically just zeros it out to the little thing i put on here so the measurements would be proper when i add to it and then i'm going to put one troy ounce of silver in here all right so that's going to be close enough and then i'm going to switch this over to gramps and we actually need this number here so now i'm going to do some math and show you exactly how i get to this one number that you're just going to use to make all of your calculations work and you don't have to do all this math every time you just have to do it this once but i'm going to show you how to get to it and why it makes sense so you want the fine silver so the 99.9 percent and these are all going to be percents and then we're going to subtract the 925 percent of the sterling to get what we need which is 7.4 percent then you need to take the percentage here and turn it into a decimal and to do that you just need to move the decimal point over two spaces so that will be zero point zero seven 4 like that this is the number you're going to need and all we need to do now is take our original 31.1 and multiply it by this new number and that will equal what we need to add but i'm not going to do that in my head so here it is on the calculator which is 2.3 and what this is is grams because this was grams so we just need 2.3 grams of copper added to our already measured out 3.1 grams of silver that's it so to make this whole thing a lot easier just take your amount of silver that you have and multiply it by 0.074 and then that will equal the copper that you need and all this will be in grams so pretty easy so to do that with this i'm just going to tear this out so it's at zero again and then add some of my copper so this is our mixture that we're going to use to make our sterling silver so that's about it that same math equation will work for any amount of silver you just have to have a scale that you can actually use that much on this scale can only go to uh one and a half try ounces so i can't really do much on it and you can go under an ounce and do the same thing so now we need to melt this so when it comes to actually pouring your metals out there's a couple different options you can use different ingot molds to make it into workable bars or into rods so you can turn it into wire easier this is a graphite one right here that you can pour it into and it'll make whatever shape is here this is an adjustable steel mold that you can just unscrew like that and you can see it's just a flat surface but one cool thing you can do with this is if you don't want a piece that's that big you can shrink it all the way down and make a little square piece of wire or something square like that and you can pretty much go anywhere in this range so there's also this one which happens to be for making wire and you can see that it has the channels for that or if you flip it over it is also for making sheets and you can do the same thing which is really nice you also can pour it directly into some water and this will basically make your own casting grain that you can use later for casting new pieces or anything like that so you have options so when it comes to actually melting down your metals you're going to need a crucible i have a video on how to season this because when you get it you just can't use it straight out of the box you have to season it so right up here will be a link to that video it's basically just putting borax into it and melting it into it but i show you exactly what to do you're also going to need a torch that can actually handle this so i'm using a smith's little torch that is hooked up to oxygen acetylene if you are using something like this it will not work you can use propane but it has to be a protein propane oxygen setup because it doesn't get hot enough like this and if you have one of those tiny butane torches that i see a lot of people using it won't do this at all you can buy something that is called map gas that will do this it comes in like a yellow container i'll put it on the screen now and it's very similar to the container like this but has a different nozzle setup and it's a much hotter gas one thing i also like to do is to use a tripod so the tripod allows me to put my crucible on top of it and keep it off the ground and allows me to heat it you can build enclosures for this and everything too but i don't really have the setup for that so this is how i've been doing it so what i'm going to do is take all my metal and just kind of pour it in there and this white container back here is full of borax which is a laundry detergent type of soap that you can get almost anywhere but it also acts as a flux so just sprinkle a little bit in here it also helps with like impurities and stuff like that and that's actually what's all over this is the flux holding everything down once everything's melted it pretty much floats on top of the flux and allows for smoother pouring and just making everything work properly so pick it up it's pretty cheap also make sure to use some sort of dark glasses with this because everything is going to get very bright so make sure you have some sort of ventilation or do this outside so when it comes to the mold itself you need to prepare this as you can see it's all wet in here this is actually an oil that's in there and that works fine for keeping the metal from sticking to it you can also if you're using a acetylene setup put soot onto it and it'll make it so nothing will get stuck to it so to do this we're just going to turn on the acetylene part only and kind of paint this with soot and from that these won't even really be hot so i could close this up make sure you're sealed completely on the bottom and tighten this up and one other thing is this needs to be warm if it's not it's going to suck all the heat away and freeze your metal probably near the top and then you'll just pour everything over the top and all over the place that's also why i have these metal things down that have lips on them so if you do spill it catches in here and you'll be able to collect all your metal and it won't burn everything you can use a torch like this and just kind of heat this whole thing up or you can use your smith's little torch also or your casting torch to really heat it up real quick so i'm also going to have my carbon one here which is just for the extra silver if i overflow my mold or if it just can't hold enough so i'm going to show you as close as i possibly can with this to show what is melting down and how it all melts together i'm using a macro lens on my camera so you can see this and so i don't melt my lens so you want it to be super liquidy like this before you can pour it so there we go so all this is going to be extremely hot now and then you can see i got some silver outside of it so like i said make sure to do it on something that can catch your metal so when you're pouring your metal you want to make sure it's all in one continuous flow i had kind of stopped a little bit because i was afraid of overflowing so now i have two pieces but there we go there's our new ingots for making wire i need to quench these and get them cooled down so i can handle them and then probably put them through some pickling solution to get everything else off of them and they should be good to use so i know a lot of people are afraid of this torch and if you already have a torch set up that you like and you don't want to have to spend the couple hundred dollars or around 700ish dollars to get this set up you can always get a furnace and there's a bunch of different types of this one i just happen to have this and all you have to do really is plug it in set your temperature and fill this up with your metal of choice and melt it down and once it gets to its temp that it needs to be at you can just pour it out of there directly into your mold also really good for doing castings but it takes about an hour or so for this to warm up all the way and this takes about six minutes or so but you're also going through a bunch of different gas and that can add up in cost eventually i'll have links to everything in the description so you can check out the pricing of things and see what fits your budget for doing this all right so here we are our nice clean little pieces for rolling out so to do this you're going to need a rolling mill of some sort so i have a combo one so this can make wire and flat sheet and this one is one of the wire only ones so i'll be making a full video on how to turn these into multiple types of wire using this fairly soon it might already be up by time you see this but if not keep checking out my channel and subscribe and you'll be notified when that video comes out so that should sum up just about everything to get your own sterling silver to the point where you can start working it and making it into whatever you need so i hope this was helpful if it was leave a like and so let me know in the comments if this is something you would actually do or if you just want to buy sterling already made and i get back to just about every comment on all of my videos so feel free to leave a comment other than that that's it for this video and i hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: GomeowCreations

Views: 151,699

Keywords: jewelry making, jewellery making, silver smith, gold smith, good jewelry teacher, basic jewelry skills, how to make a ring, DIY, do it yourself, sterling silver, how to make jewelry, 925 silver, how to tell fake silver, sterling silver vs silver, real or fake 925 silver, jewelry tutorials youtube, jewelry tutorials free, jewelry making tiktok, sterling silver cuban link chain, 925 silver grillz, 925 silver cleaning

Id: Ol6-FfjwOIE

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020