HAPPY NEW YEAR PICKLE!

Ok, I've made some good changes in 2009, like switching to organic foods, adding healthy greens like mustard greens, dandelion and beet greens to my family's menus. And to continue it into the New Year I made a change that is also healthy - I've changed my pickle.

If you do not do metalsmithing you probably won't know what pickle is. Pickle is an acid compound used to clean metal after soldering. It removes oxidation, flux, anti-flux from your piece. Since I started jewelry making I've always used SPAREX or a Sparex-like product which is a dry, granular, sulphuric acid based compound that is mixed with water and heated in a pickle pot (a small crock pot). I could get technical and tell you that it is the combination of the sulphate part of the sulphuric acid plus some hydrogen together with the sodium part of the sodium chloride to make sodium bisulphate, or correctly, sodium hydrogen sulphate NaHSO4 (but I won't)!

One of my students recently expressed concern over using Sparex. She could smell the fumes from it and after reading up on it she discovered that breathing the fumes could be very harmful. So I decided to look into safer methods. After researching it a bit, I came up with this recipe for pickle:

1 cup of vinegar with 2 tbs pickling salt - that's it!

I mixed up a batch, heated it in my pickle pot and whalla!!! It worked! Quickly and efficiently!

Vinegar is still an acid, but a kinder one. I still don't recommend breathing in the fumes of course but I feel it is a safer alternative. (oh, and way cheaper too!)

And I wish you a Happy, Healthy and Safe 2010! All comments, opinions and ideas are welcome...........