How do you anneal silver tubing and pickle?

[KFraley51]

After breaking beads and splitting silver cores, I looked here for some advice on what I might be doing wrong and found out that if you anneal and then pickle that might help. I could not find any info on temps and times for annealing or what pickle means. Please help so I can use this expensive Jim Moore coring tool that I just had to have. :) Thank You all.

Karen

[PixieFireBeads]

To anneal the tubing, you would use a small butane torch to get it red hot then drop it in a bowl of water. You would drop it in a crock pot of a pickling solution, that you can buy from a jewelry place like Rio Grand to remove the fire scale from the annealing process.

But, I think it's more important that you core beads with only perfect ends. I've had both the problems you've mentioned when I tried coring beads without perfectly executed ends. If you ends are not perfect, Jim's tool will not give you the results you are looking for no matter how much you anneal or pickle.

[Karen Hardy]

What she said. Also, another metalsmithing trick is, sharpie marker
disappears at annealing temp. So if you are not sure what is "red hot",
just swipe a line of sharpie on your tubing (mind you, anneal the tubing
AFTER you cut it, not before) and then just gently heat it until the line
disappears.

To anneal the tubing, you would use a small butane torch to get it red hot then drop it in a bowl of water. You would drop it in a crock pot of a pickling solution, that you can buy from a jewelry place like Rio Grand to remove the fire scale from the annealing process.

But, I think it's more important that you core beads with only perfect ends. I've had both the problems you've mentioned when I tried coring beads without perfectly executed ends. If you ends are not perfect, Jim's tool will not give you the results you are looking for no matter how much you anneal or pickle.

[Hayley]

What they said! If I may add - get tubings that have thinner walls, e.g. 27 ga - that will help eliminate the splitting issue. I have cored hundreds of beads and had maybe three split. Never bother annealing the ss tubes.

[Lea Zinke]

No need to anneal tubing, literally hundreds later never have, never will!

HTH,
Lea

[artwhim]

I did recently have one tube that would split every time. I was frustrated because I had cut the tube for about 15 beads and no matter how slow and carefully I would try to core, each would eventually split. So I tried annealing each piece, but the split till occurred, although it didn't happen as fast. The problem only occurred with pieces cut from one specific tube, all the other tube was fine, so I finally came to the conclusion that the piece must have a manufacturing flaw. Finally decided to save what hair was left on my head and not try to use that piece anymore!

If you are also breaking beads, you may want to stop the coring process before the core earlier and then finish it by hand with a rubber or wood mallet.

[Firebrand Beads]

Hey Kathy - was that a larger-diameter tube? Those do have thicker walls, and they do better with annealing/quenching than not. But if you annealed them and they still split, it could very well have been a flaw from the factory. Did you talk to them? I know, harder to get a human being at some places than others, lol!

Kathy is right, though, about finishing by hand. I like to use a burnisher to push the last bit of silver into place. That is a smooth steel jewelers tool, and it doesn't require you to bang on the bead, just push. FWIW...