"Harold & Susan Vordos" wrote in message
...

What Boris said. *Exactly* what Boris said. Silver solder, "real"
silver
solder, is almost identical in appearance to yellow brass.

Really? The silver solder I've used for sterling silver is, well, silver
colored. It's available in soft, medium and hard from the precious metal
dealer. The 'hardness' refers to the melting point and thus the silver
content. The color match is nearly perfect when soldering sterling with hard
solder.

I believe that one would need to make an old fashioned brass spelter to get
a decent color match. That's obviously unnecessary as previous posters said
a tight fitting joint and very little solder will make excellent joints.
Silver solder is not intended to fill large gaps anyway...


Do not confuse solders with 5% or so silver content with silver solder.
The only thing they have in common is the fact that silver is mentioned in
the names of each one.


I believe that's called 'silver bearing solder'. It can be really important
not to get solders with lead and real silver solder not mixed up. Another
tragic case of language not being useful enough for technical purposes -
isn't silver soldering actually brazing because of some special property of
silver?. Anyway, if you heat a silver piece thats got lead solder on it up
to silver soldering temp, the lead will burn pits in the silver.