Silver Solder

[SLAYAR]

Hi this is my first post and I hope that someone can help! I'm in the process of trying to make a pure silver tonearm interconect. So far I have found a supplier which can supply reasonable cheap 99.99% pure silver tonearm cable. I have Eichmann silver bullet plugs which are also milled from 99.9% pure silver. This is where things start to fall down. I have 4% solder to connect the tonearm cable to the Eichmanns. But I have a friend that is a jeweller that can supply pure silver solder. My ultimate goal would be to use 99% pure solder to connect the tonearm cable to the Eichmann's. There are one or two things that I would like answering if possible :-

1. How high a content silver solder can a normal soldering iron solder?

2. Can anyone recommend a decent silver solder flux for high content silver
solder.

3. Would any gas powered soldering gun work for high content silver soldering?


Thanks in advance.

[zigzagflux]

You need too much heat for pure silver soldering. Use Cardas quad eutectic solder; the small amount of silver present will be sufficient for a quality joint.

[SY]

Or plain old silver-bearing tin-lead. I bought some 2% silver solder cheap from Radio Shack and it makes terrific connections to silver wire. Beautifully shiny and fully-wetting joints.

[Face]

Radio Shack solder does not flow as well as Cardas Quad or WBT.

[SY]

Don't know, never would pay the ripoff artists their prices, but the RS solder flows well and makes a beautiful, reliable joint with silver wires and silver terminals. What else can you ask for? Leaves money to spend on irrelevant stuff like music.

[wakibaki]

If you attempt to use 99% silver to solder the melting point will be virtually identical with that of the wire and the connectors. This is indeed where things start to fall down. The process at that point might more accurately be described as welding. I don't know what the bullet connectors are exactly like in this case, maybe you can get the wire to spark weld to them?

A really inventive person might contrive a connector which could be swaged or crimped to the wire. I think it's moderately easy to cast silver, or you could get some rod and turn it in a power drill, or lathe if you have one...

w

...or you could just not bother, as silver wire is not strictly necessary. Why not spend the money on a nice medallion?

[zigzagflux]

I gotta say, not to be divisive, but the Cardas quad really is the nicest solder I've ever used. I've used the RS silver, Kester "44" 2% silver, Kester "44" 63/37, Parts Express 4%, and some unknown flavors, too.

The Cardas flux content seems to be a little excessive, and ideally needs a little cleaning, but the flow really is impressive.

I also think, other than getting some silver content to prevent leaching of silver plated terminals, that there ain't no difference in performance between any of the above solders.

[theAnonymous1]

Originally Posted by SY

Don't know, never would pay the ripoff artists their prices, but the RS solder flows well and makes a beautiful, reliable joint with silver wires and silver terminals. What else can you ask for? Leaves money to spend on irrelevant stuff like music.

I love the RS silver stuff.... it's the only solder I use. It's not quite "eutetic", but I've yet to get a cold joint using it.

I would never pay Cardas prices for solder.

[SLAYAR]

Many thanks for your replies guys but my questions mainly remain unanswered. I use 4.6% silver content and this is pretty easy to solder with a 15watt no-name soldering iron. I'll be trying 9.6% silver content soon and see if this works any better.

I wish to use a high silver content because I want to get the purist conductor possible for carrying sound! My logic is simple, I have a 99.9% pure RCA plug, then I use 4.6% silver content solder where my 99.99% pure silver tonearm cables meets to connect the two togther! Surely this must effect the carrying of the sonics along the tonearm wires. Hence, keep the silver as pure as possible, hopefully to keep the conduction as good as possible. I'm even considering hardwiring the tonearm cables directly into the phonostage RCA connects, this way we bypass the gold plated RCA's inputs which my phonostage has which are massively inferior to silver for conductivity. In an ideal world I would love to have a continuous 99.9% pure wiring from the cartridge itself to the RCA inputs on the phonostage PCB!!!!

[SY]

Surely this must effect the carrying of the sonics along the tonearm wires.

Why should it? "Sonics" are not carried along the tonearm wire, the electrical signal from the cartridge is. There is some small benefit to using silver wire for that, but the soldered joints represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total loop resistance.

In any event, bottom line is that if you want everything to be silver, you're welding, not soldering. A very different process with questionable (at best) benefit and large potential drawbacks.