Sunday, June 19, 2005

Argentium - Dim the lights!!!


From the picture above you can see I had a little trouble today. I was annealing a piece of Argentium to prepare it for hammering. I was working in fairly strong light and thought the piece had cooled sufficiently to allow me to quench it in water….Wrong! As you can see, the results were disastrous. Oh well, another piece to be used in casting or fusing. The next piece I tried to anneal I allowed to cool a bit more and had no problems. Working in dim light, and waiting for the red glow to almost go away is a much safer approach to the problem. The picture of the Argentium above was taken right after it was quenched. Note the lack of tarnish or firescale that you would see on standard Sterling.
My wife wore the pendant shown in my last posting to the Tombstone, AZ Gem and Mineral show Tombstone's Gem & Mineral Show this weekend. The piece attracted a lot of attention. There was quite a bit of interest shown, not only in the piece, but also in Argentium.