Sneaky Soldering

Getting an ultra clean weld in a mixed-metal design

By Bob Lynn

Has a mixed-metal job that doesn’t have any tolerance for cleanup after soldering ever landed on your bench? Because of the design, you can’t use rivets to hold the yellow and white gold pieces together, and laser welding would require a huge amount of work.

If you ever come across a situation where you can’t afford any of the gold solder that holds an inlay piece of yellow gold in place to show up on the white gold component, here’s a little trick. The example shown here is very basic, but the technique can be applied to any design that requires a clean weld but doesn’t have any cleanup tolerance.

1. In this example, you need to inlay a piece of yellow gold into a white gold band without any solder showing once you are done. Because the grooves in the ring surface are high polish and butt up against the inlay, there is no way to bright cut the junction between the two metals. There’s also no way to get a...