The Bane of my Blog: Soldering

I began this session by cutting a tiny piece of soldering with metal cutters and then using the flux (in the picture below) and painted some of the flux onto the ring around the place I was soldering. This would help the ring stay clean during the torching. I then placed the tiny piece of soldering onto the gap in the rings and placed them on the fire bricks. Using the torch I then gently waved a medium heat flame over the rings, gradually heating them up, until the soldering began to melt and started to run through the gap. To make sure the soldering ran evenly, I heated both rings until they glowed an even red colour.

I had to slightly enlarge each ring with the metal instrument below and a hammer. To ensure that the soldering was not put under pressure and snap under this process, you needed to keep turning the ring around and hammer all over the ring to get an even enlargement.

There was some soldering raised from the rings' surface so used a small file to bring it down and then used a 800 sandpaper (fine grain but not too fine) to gently polish each, and then I used an even finer grain of 1200 to get a smooth and even surface on each ring.

I then used tweezers to hold the rings in place whilst I soldered them to the back of the ring piece.
This was incredibly difficult to do as you had to make sure the tweezers did not fall even slightly out of place as this would affect the use of the ring.

I used the liquid flux again to place the squares of solder next to where they needed to fuse the rings to the back of the copper plate.

I attempted to do this process by myself but it went so badly wrong that Malcolm had to do this one for me :( I think where I went wrong was that I did not angle my flame enough so the soldering did not flow into the right places. I also did not hold the flame over the rings and base enough to evenly heat it which definitely hindered its success.