Hello all,

 I'm new to metal clay and I was wondering if it was possible to attach an art clay piece to sterling silver. I have a plain sterling silver locket that I would like to add to and am not sure of what to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I havent exactly done it yet but I have read that its not so easy by soldering and the reason is that art clay and pmc are not solid like stirling and under the electron micrososcope apparently its a bit like a honeycomb because of the biding and so the solver flows down and fills the gaps rather then staying there forthe attachment to the stirling. One can try but the section must have a high shine with lots of rubbing with the bunisher to get as flat a surface as possible. Other alternatives are designing it to be attached with some sort of cold connection like a rivet. Not sure if any sort of glue would work no one has mentioned that. I guess that spot welder would work... but most of us dont have one of those... perhaps people in the know could answer that?

Soryy I couldnt be too much help but if you do get it to work I would really like to know.

cheers

Anne

All I can say is that I had luck embedding bezel wire into art clay and then torch firing it.  It was FS bezel wire, but I expect sterling findings and so forth would behave similarly.  I don't know about soldering, and the MC will melt/fuse before the sterling, so I would guess embedding it is your best bet.  The clay will shrink when fired, don't forget to take that into account.

You might try asking this question and/or doing a search on the metal clay forum.  I do know people use sterling and fs elements with silver metal clays pretty often.  Someone there might have a far more authoritative answer than I!