Earlier this year Rio Grande had a bench tips contest, the winning tip was a speedy way to solder jump rings. Necklaces and chain mail use tons of jump rings, a spectacular look can be obtained by using rings that have been soldered shut. I especially like to hammer them a little flat, something you can’t do with unsoldered jr’s.

The tip was to use a graphite rod as a mandrel to hold the rings while you brazed them. Not having a suitable piece of graphite, I decided to try graphite refills from a mechanical pencil.

I used .09 mm Pentel pencils leads and attempted to secure them in a pin vice. This was tricky since the ones in the middle tended to slide out. I wanted to use a big bundle of them, the intense heat from the torch could melt a slimmer package.

Once I had the pin vice all set and secured in the third hand, I slid on some rings and applied flux. I used a very quick soldering method where you hold a piece of wire solder in a metal sleeve and hold it to the joint at just the right moment.  Usually when I solder I apply flux, dry it with the torch, then apply solder pallions before proceeding. This eliminates the drying time,  since speed is more important than accuracy.

I found that if I slid 20 rings onto the graphite bundle, the 10 or so in the middle would come out fine, but three or four of them on each end would be warped, since the individual little pencil leads did not form a round bundle and the some of the silver jump rings melted slightly. I think once they’re planished, they will be interesting and free form. The majority of them soldered just fine.

So I went back to my other method of soldering jump rings. Although I still used by quick brazing method, I laid the rings down flat on a ceramic honeycomb.

I think a graphite rod to use as a soldering mandrel would be a good idea, although not a necessity. This experiment helped me to evaluate this.