Annealing German Silver

[frogwalking]

I bought some german silver inlay wire before finding  this site.  Can I anneal this wire to get it soft enough to use, or should I buy some sterling silver wire before I begin?  I have never used wire inlay before.

[jmforge]

I know some of the gunmakers use nickel silver/German silver, but most of the knifemakers use pure silver wire for some reason.  Nickel silver is pretty much brass with nickel added, so you should be able to anneal it.

[Rolf]

You can aneal german silver, but it will never get as soft as sterling silver and it work hardens a lot faster. I hate working with it . When it comes to workability, silver is my top number one, copper gets a good number2, brass 3-4 depending on quality. German silver is 6-8 . The higher the nickel content, the more it looks like silver, but the worse it is to work with. German silver with a low nickel content as a weak yellow shade which is very unpopulare with knife collectors. If I can't afford silver, I'd much rather use a good yellow brass.

In the first silversmithing class I took we practiced on german silver because its a lot cheaper and a lot more difficult to work than sterling silver. The idea was if we could make the object in german silver, we would have no problems when making it in sterling silver.

Best regards
Rolfkt

[Birddog6]

I got some from Dixie one time that was so dang hard it was like spring steel.  I would anneal it & soon as I would bend it  the stuff hardened. I finally ended up giving it away.  Really aggravating stuff.  The last I bought was from MBS and it was .008 in thickness, if I remember correctly, and very easy to work with. It was so good I reordered 6 rolls of it to last me a while..

[JTR]

Silver wire/ribbon is actually pretty cheap unless you buy like a hundred miles of it, so why mess with german silver at all?
John

[Pete G.]

If you are using it for wire inlay don't anneal. The "springiness" helps smooth the curves and also helps to keep the wire in the recess.