Colin Mahler tells us about Silver Filled jump rings

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Hi there. My name is Colin. I am the chainmaille instructor and maker of jump rings here at Beaducation.  We are all looking for a reasonably priced, and equally beautiful, alternative to sterling silver. When Lisa Kelly sent me a spool of silver filled wire for making jump rings, I was pretty excited. 

I had never worked with this material before and was eager to start playing. I work mainly in sterling silver, gold-filled, and copper. Sterling silver and gold-filled are both harder than copper. 

Silver Filled Jump Rings

Jump rings are made by winding wire around a mandrel to make a coil. With sterling silver and gold filled, I use ½ hard wire, so the metal is somewhat stiff and will spring back off the mandrel a tiny bit after I have wound the coil. This makes the jump rings slightly larger than the mandrel they were wound on. Copper by comparison, is very soft. So, when I wind copper wire onto a mandrel, it lays flat to the mandrel; there is no spring back. Because of this, copper rings come out just the tiniest bit smaller than sterling silver or gold filled jump rings wound on the same size mandrel. Which should not seem like a big deal... except that I make chainmaille out of my jump rings and on some weaves, the sizing of the jump rings has to be exact or the weave won’t work.

Jump Ring Maker above.

Silver filled wire has a brass core, so I was curious to see how it would behave. It sprang back slightly off the mandrel after I wound up the coil. I cut the coils with my jump ring maker and threw them in the tumbler to clean. They came out beautifully.

Above are as pair of Mahler's Byzantine Diamond Earrings.

Then it was time to make some chainmaille. Since my main concern with the jump rings was the sizing, I chose a chainmaille pattern that requires exact sizes, the Byzantine Diamond. I discovered the hard way (while teaching a class) that while sterling and GF jump rings of the same size work just fine for this weave, copper jump rings wound on the same size mandrel, because they come out just a touch smaller, are actually too small to make the weave work. I have to use a slightly larger mandrel to wind copper jump rings for this particular weave. I was not sure if this would be the case with the silver filled, so I picked up my pliers and got to work. 

The jump rings had a nice snap to them when they were closed and the Byzantine Diamond came together without a hitch. I then proceeded to oxidize the Diamond in liver of sulfur, scrub the surface clean with pro polish pad, and throw it back in the tumbler to shine it back up. If I didn’t know it was silver filled, I would have never guessed that it was not sterling.

I have been won over by the silver filled wire. It seems like an excellent alternative to sterling. As a chainmaille instructor, I usually provide the jump ring kits for my students in sterling. Which at $40 something per ounce, I can no longer afford to do. I thought I would have to start using copper or stop providing kits altogether. Now I’m gonna switch to silver filled. 

* Colin Mahler teaches more than a dozen chainmaille classes for Beaducation. Many of her extraordinairy designs can be purchased on her website as well.