When I first started soldering, I would buy pre-made flux from Myron Toback on 47th St. One week however, I found myself out of flux and stuck in suburbia, so I had to hunt down an alternative.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in my library of technical manuals I found a simple, yet effective recipe for flux. Mix powdered boric acid and 20 Mule Team Borax in a 3:1 ratio. Some people will dissolve this in denatured alcohol, other recipes call for ammonium chloride.<\/p>\n
I have had a lot of luck with grinding the two powders together with the back of my soldering tweezers and then mixing up what I need with water in an old ceramic ashtray.<\/p>\n
To use, I coat the area that I am soldering (the entire thing if it’s small) avoiding any areas that have previously been soldered. I use a small, inexpensive paintbrush.\u00a0 I dry the flux with my torch, then I coat the solder in flux and place it on the join. If I do it right and work quickly enough, the cool, wet solder will stick to the dried flux and the solder won’t blow away in the flame. I might dab the edges with some additional flux, maybe.<\/p>\n
Recently I tried to mix up some flux ahead of time and add some pieces of solder to it. I think if I was in my studio more often, I would have used this little batch up, but I found that it separated and the borax\/boric powders formed a pan at the bottom of the jar. Left undisturbed, the solder eventually turned blue. I would have thought that the blue was from minerals in the tap water I used, but then I remembered that I had a crucible become coated in a beautiful, blue, glassy substance. I had sprinkled borax on some casting grain that I was trying to melt.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first started soldering, I would buy pre-made flux from Myron Toback on 47th St. One week however, I found myself out of flux and stuck in suburbia, so I had to hunt down an alternative. Somewhere in my library of technical manuals I found a simple, yet effective recipe for flux. Mix powdered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-solder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1000,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/1000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}