Simple Silver Jewelry With Bare Minimum Tools

I've been making jewelry in my spare time for over a decade now, and I've been making sterling jewelry for seven years of that time. However, everytime I try to get someone else into making jewelry in any sort of way that involves soldering, they tend to get very intimidated by the complicated setup I've amassed over the years. In this project, my goal is to break down what the bare minimum supplies are that you need to get started, and make the process less intimidating. Although it is a hobby that can quickly get complicated and expensive, you don't need as much as you might think to get started. So, to do that, let's make a simple silver ring.

I will be using fine silver instead of sterling silver for this tutorial for the sake of showing the solder seam better, but the main differences to be aware of are that fine silver will not tarnish or fire scale as easily, but it is much softer and therefore will make less durable jewelry, and it melts at a lower temperature than sterling, making it a little bit more time sensitive for soldering. Fine silver is essentially pure silver, while sterling silver is an alloy with copper for strength. The color is a little bit different, and my solder is color matched to sterling silver, which is why I'm using fine silver for this project so you can see the solder seam a bit better on the final project. Just keep in mind that sterling will tarnish/fire scale more in the soldering process, so you will have more cleanup after than I am showing here. If you really hate cleaning up the ring after soldering and don't mind the softer metal, fine silver may be a good choice for your project, but the wire itself is more likely to melt in the process, so you may need more practice with flame timing to get it right.

I'm going to go in the order of the pictures, so the list might not make chronological sense, but please bear with me. I took pictures in whatever order I found the stuff.

1. A surface to solder on, and a way to keep the flame in the area you are soldering in. I use two bricks on a cookie sheet to keep the flame in the right area, and a honeycomb soldering board as a surface to solder on, but to start with you don't really need a specialized soldering board. It can be helpful later for pining things in place, but you could literally just replace it with a concrete slab where the cookie sheet is and solder directly on that. The main goal is a (mostly cleanish) fireproof surface that will reflect heat back towards the metal.
2. A butane torch. I have a fancier torch by now, but you really don't need it to start with. The dremel torch shown here is what I used almost exclusively for three plus years. I prefer something like the dremel torch where the flame is in line with the body of the torch, but a kitchen butane torch should work too.
3. Silver wire. I got most of mine from Monster Slayer, but they're out of business now, so Rio Grande is pretty good if you're willing to make an account with them. Otherwise you can usually find decent prices and selection on etsy or the like. I'm using 16ga for this project. I wouldn't recommend a thinner wire (higher number guage) for a ring, but you can definitely make it thicker if you want. Don't use silver plated or filled, you want wire that is silver all the way through. For fine silver vs. sterling silver, see introduction.
4. Solder. Same theory to electronics solder, but not lead based. There are a bunch of different types, you can get wire or sheet or paste, but my preference is sheet solder because it lays flat. You will likely see "hard medium easy" or something similar in the options when you go to order it. That is how easily it melts. If you want to use fine silver, I would recommend easy solder. Otherwise, the main purpose of having the different melting temperatures is if you want to do multiple joins on one piece without melting previous joins.
5. Wire cutters, pliers, and tin snips. Technically, if you use wire solder you can probably get away without the tin snips, so it's up to you if that is a consideration in what type of solder you get. For me it saves a lot of time in the long run to have sheet solder, but you may have different priorities. I would spend a bit more on the wire cutters if possible. If you can get cutters that give a mostly flush cut then you can get away without filing, but if they leave an angled end then you should probably also get some sort of jewelry file, although an emory board will do in a pinch.
6. Ring mandrel or dowel in the diameter of the ring you want to make. If you can find a dowel in the diameter you need, that will probably work, but having a proper ring mandrel can save you a lot of time. The taper of the ring mandrel makes it easier to slip a deformed ring on, and it makes sizing much easier.
7. Abrasive pads. I use the smallest possible grit of steel wool. I got a pack of 12 when I started, and I tear little bits off of each pad to use, so I'm still on the same pack I started with.
8. Flux. I use my-T-flux, (yes, haha, very punny, but it's the actual name) but there are a lot of options. Anything that is intended for use with silver will work, and it's frequently the same sort of flux for gold as well. I know a lot of electronics solder comes mixed with the flux already, but most jewelry solder doesn't, and even if it does, having the solder can help protect the rest of the project from firescale.
9. Brush for flux if you don't get a spray bottle. I use it for moving the solder around too. There are specific flux brushes, but I just use a really abused kids paintbrush. It's lasted this long.
10. Metal tweezers. I don't have a picture that I can find, but it's nice to have them. Especially for picking up the piece afterwards to quench it. Otherwise you may need to use the pliers.
11. Rawhide or nylon mallet. I'd suggest rawhide if you want to do this for a long time, and nylon if you don't. Rawhide mallets need to be conditioned before use (take it outside and literally hit the road. And rocks. And concrete walls. Until the ends are roughed up.) and nylon mallets usually don't, but the rawhide mallet will last longer.
12. Finally, a quenching bowl. This doesn't need to be fancy, just a bowl that can hold water and you are ok with not using for food ever again. Is it possible to clean out well enough? Maybe. Would I suggest it? Absolutely not. Jewelers as a general whole are not known for always being the most safety conscious, but I'm also a chemistry major, and you don't want that residue in your food.

There are plenty of tutorials out there for how to size a ring appropriately, and that's a good idea to learn, but not strictly necessary to make a ring, so we're going to skip the math for now and use the "good enough" method.

For a simple ring for yourself or someone whose hand you can borrow pretty readily, you won't get an exact size, but you can get pretty close by wrapping the wire around the desired finger to get the right fit. It should be a little tight, so there is some resistance to the ring coming off, but not so tight that it is painful. But again, we're going for rough estimates today. This is supposed to be your very first jewelry soldering project, it's ok if it's not a perfect fit.

Try to make sure that the wire is wrapped snuggly all the way around your finger, using the pliers if necessary to help make it more round, and when it fits about how you want it too, slip it off your finger without disturbing the shape if possible. You can either use a marker to make a line so you cut both sides in the same place, or just cut one side and use it as a reference for the other.

If you have good cutters, you can work on aligning the two butts of the wire to be touching each other and nicely lined up the way you want the ring to be. If you still have pointy ends, take a file or emory board and flatten the ends so they sit together nicely. Solder joins, but it isn't good at filling big gaps, so the more flush the ends sit against each other the better.

Once you have the wire cut and shaped for the ring, you can put it on your soldering surface and get ready to solder.

You will want a small piece of your solder ready. If you have wire, cut a piece maybe 1-2mm long. If you have sheet solder, you will need to cut a small strip off first, which will get you a little eyelash looking thing, and then cut a tiny square from that. Smaller is better if possible, but it is also dependent on how flush the ends of the wire are. If they aren't very flush, you will need more solder. The solder chip I'm showing on my finger is a relatively large solder chip, but it works for our purposes. The reason this is bad later on if you continue making jewelry is that it will leave a little bit of solder around the seam that you don't need, and may make the solder seam more visible.

Once you have a solder chip, place it under the solder seam (where the two ends of the wire meet) and try to make sure that it is touching both sides. We are heating the piece from above, and the solder will flow the most towards the heat.

Finally, paint the whole thing with flux, with special attention the the solder seam and the solder chip.

I have videos instead of images for this step, so I'm really hoping that you can see the video, but I'll try to go into extra detail to compensate.

Essentially, once the soon to be ring is set up on your flame proof surface on top of the solder and brushed with flux, all you need to do is actually melt the solder. And how do you melt solder? Fire. Depending on the torch you have, you will either have a built in lighter or have to light it with a striker. I would strongly suggest a built in lighter to start with. You can see one of the videos is of me lighting my torch. In that video I have the butane at full flow so it's easier to see. It's probably better to turn it down to light, especially the first time you do it.

For sterling I would leave the flame at full, but because fine silver melts more easily, I turned down the flame a bit to avoid melting it.

Once the flame is on and steady (most butane torches should be able to "lock" on) then you can start circling the ring with the tip of the flame to warm it up. You don't want glowing red for this part, but you do want to heat the whole ring. This helps anneal the ring for latter, and as the metal heats up, the two ends are pushed just a little closer together. In general you will do this longer for thicker metal, but in my case it was just a few seconds. When you see the flux bubble and turn white you can probably start focusing on the actual area you want to solder.

Once you focus in on the solder seam, you still don't really want to stop the flame from moving. I usually start with circles around the area getting smaller to focus on the exact point where the ends of the wire join, and then switch to a gentle back and forth on that same area when the metal starts to get visibly heated. Do keep in mind that you are trying to melt the solder, not the wire, so it's better to take your time to get it right.

You will start to get a feel for what the color will look like right before the solder melts after a few attempts, but because I wear colored lenses for light sensitivity my description of that will probably be off. I'm pretty sure the metal will get past red hot before the solder melts, but the wire itself will usually melt before you get all the way to yellow.

When the solder melts it will flow through the solder seam. In the video you can see the solder jumping up into the gap between the ends of the wire right at the very end of the video. I had to cut it off there so I could turn off the torch with both hands.

Once the torch is off use either tweezers or your pliers to pick up the ring and dip it into the bowl of water. This should cool it off enough that you can touch it. I hope I don't need to say this, but DON"T PICK THE METAL UP WHILE IT"S HOT!!! Additionally, the surrounding area will stay hot for much longer than the metal itself, so be careful with the whole setup for at least a few minutes. Knowing when things are safe to touch will come with time, and probably a few small burns. From talking to other hobbyists and professional jewelers it seems to be a near universal experience to pick up a hot metal piece with your bare hands at least once, but you don't need to do it on your first day.

The ring you made will almost never be quite the right shape coming off of the soldering station, and especially if you use sterling there will likely be a good deal of tarnish/fire scale to clean off of the ring.

I personally prefer to reshape the ring first, because the act of hammering on the ring can help break up some firescale before I start trying to clean it, but either way works.

To reshape the ring, slide it onto the ring mandrel or dowel and start gently tapping it with the rawhide mallet. Work in a star pattern to start, then touch up obviously still misshapen areas, and then slowly rotate the mandrel or the dowel while still gently hammering. In general I hammer down when I'm working on a mandrel, and then hammer gently the other way to get the ring off when I'm done.

To clean the ring, tear off a piece of steel wool or other gentle abrasive and use it to scour the ring. If you have polishing mediums, then it would be appropriate to use them after cleaning, but since we're going for the absolute minimum basics for your first ring, this is not really necessary. I didn't use any polishing compounds or mediums other than the steel wool for this project. Cleaning the ring can take a decent bit of time, depending on how much fire scale there is. There are plenty of tools and chemical solutions to make it faster, but it's perfectly possible to do it manually, and you're not doing it wrong if it takes a while.

Congratulations! You just made a silver ring. There can definitely be a learning curve, but overall it's a much easier thing to do than it may sound like. From there, it's pretty simple to start slowly branching out and figuring out how to make more complicated projects. If you keep going with it, you will absolutely end up with a LOT more tools and supplies, but this is really all you need to get started with simple silver smithing. To get better, you can experiment with shapes other than a circle, different shapes and sizes of wire, and making multiple soldering seams for one piece of jewelry. I would suggest simple shapes that you can easily turn into earrings as a good next step. But most importantly, have fun! This is an awesome skill to be able to show off to people, and it can branch off into so many different ways to make jewelry.

If you want to practice soldering and spend less money on supplies, the same techniques work for copper, but copper requires higher temperatures, so it's not one to one practice.