On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 03:29:57 -0800, in rec.crafts.jewelry "Vanessa Boscia"
wrote:

I'm using a propane / O2 torch and stirred the heck out of the molten metal
with a quartz rod..... Poured it into some water to make some grains and
lo-and-behold....
I got a mess!
The copper and silver separate into a un-homogenous clump.

As Don says in another post, use some flux. In this case, either just boric
acid, or a mix of borax and boric acid powders added to the melting metal will
help a lot.

However, I suspect that your metal is better mixed than you thing. Often what
happens is a coppery appearance on the grains caused by copper oxide forming on
the grain surface, then reducing as it his the water, or being sufficiently
dissolved again so just a slight film of copper coloring can be left on the
surface. You may find that if you pickle your grain, then put it in a tumbler
to just tumble against itself (no tumbling media needed), that it will look a
lot more as it should when you're done. Remember to pour from enough of a
height, and into a deep enough container of water (usually takes at least a
foot deep, and more than that is better) to get fully discrete grains instead
of a flused lump on the bottom of the container.

In melting at first, start with the copper with just about it's own volume of
silver, and melt these together. Then add the rest of the silver and melt them
together. Copper melts enough higher than silver that it might otherwise be
hard o get it to fully melt, and in that case, you might then still have
seperate copper areas. But if you've fully melted both the copper and silver,
they won't seperate out again when you pour. It can look that way, but this is
just surface discoloration, not an indication of the actual alloy composition
of the grains.

Peter