For soldering onto stainless steel

For soldering onto silver

There are many applications where soldering a copper wire directly to a stainless steel surface would be valuable.  Normally it would be very difficult or impossible to solder a copper wire to this 1/16" diameter Type 308 stainless steel rod.  In this demonstration we will  gold plate a portion of the end of the rod and then solder an 18 gauge copper wire to the gold plated stainless steel rod.    We begin by lightly polishing the end of the rod using a metal polish to remove any oxidized material.

We have a client that wanted to plate with nickel and then 24K gold onto silver electrical contacts.  For this demonstration we are using a 28 gauge pure silver strip that is ~3mm wide.  We used an abrasive polishing cloth to remove any tarnish.  We then used a little methyl alcohol to clean the part.  It is now ready for the bright nickel plate.