Hard Water and Silvering

[Doug Bernhardt]

Has anyone here had experience with hard water and trying to silver glass? At my shop the water has been a problem and other than splashing distilled by the barrel I'm not getting a good deposit. Am considering the expense of a water softener but hesitate until I know if the salty content in softened water is as big a problem. To take care of both issues is a major expense.

[Kent Smith]

Hard water here is always and issue. A water softener usually adds salts that you do not need when silvering, typically giving a blotchy deposit. I use steam distilled for every step except soaking glue and final cleanup and rinsing. I have used tap water for cleaning with bon ami and cerium but use distilled for the final rinses. I have found a local volume source and get the water in 5's so although expensive, it just eliminates contamination. I especially find that the tin deposits more evenly with distilled on the surface. I do use tap with the silver strip, although not much is needed with the new two component strip.

[DAVE SMITH]

Doug.
Go and buy yourself a water purifier for making deionised water ,connect it up and you will have good mirrors everytime. You can buy the small ones sold by Purmutit ,just change the cartridge once it turns orange, it lasts for ages. I never use bonami for cleaning when silvering - it probably works fine but I was taught to use Ammonia. You need to use ammonia and whitning with distilled water made from your own deioniser. I never get a splotchy mirror using this method. I do know a silverer who uses canal water from the back of his house.David Barclay in Stockport used to have good results from that source.
Goodluck mate
Dave

[Roderick Treece]

Doug,
Yes, somewhere some one has had trouble with hard water,I'm sure of it.Their probably all Deadmen.

Sorry I couldn't help myself.

I started off by buying massive amount of 2.5 gallon bottles of distilled water.What a pain that was.Now I rent a deionized water bottle and it sits there ready and waiting for when I mirror.It cost about $ 40.00 per month witch seams like a lot but one job a month and it more than pays for it's self.

Roderick

[Larry White]

Rod-
I imagine you must have looked into buying one of those bottles... how much are they? Seems at $40 a month, it just might be better to own one. I suppose they need some sort of maintenance which would be covered by the $40 and would add to the overall cost of owning one. Any more insight would be appreciated.

-That Blake fella

[mgking]

You only should need distilled or deiononized water when chemistry is involved. Even washing the mirror afterwards shouldn't be a problem as the deposit has been done by then. Stripping or polishing will need clean water once you have removed the "crud" but then just one final pass.

The source of the water makes a difference. City water will have been chlorinated and that will make the silver go milky so you'll need to avoid that. Hard water will contain calcium and magnesium and water that's been standing in metal pipes will have iron and copper so these will all affect the surface chemistry of silvering which is notoriously sensitive to all kinds of things. Tinning in particular will be affected by these metals.

Deionizing replaces these metals with sodium and that should not affect the results but it's pretty expensive and seems like overkill for most of what we do. Distilled water is usually cheaper as it's also used by people that want to avoid their boilers choking up so its easier to buy. The idea is to remove the metals and the chlorine and distilling pretty much does that.

You'd need do get the water analysis from your local municipality (if you have one) to really be sure. Here in Chicago, we get water from Lake Michigan which is chlorinated so that's only a problem with the silvering pass. Well-water, rain water or river/canal water may contain organics but they shouldn't make any big difference and they're mostly removed by filtering anyway. You may get some interesting antiquing effects by not taking these things out of your water - just a thought!

Mike

[Patrick Mackle]

I just order it through the same guy that supplies my bottled water (Sparkletts)
It comes in the same style polycarbonate 5 gallon bottle as purified but with a green colored plastic cap to signify distilled.
Ask for "steam distilled" instead of filtered.
Pat

[Doug Bernhardt]

Lots of good ideas so far. The water at my shop is SO hard that the toilet turns red and the water from the tap has black (stuff) in it. So far I have had mixed results and have to work much harder to get clean silvering. The deionized thought will get further investigation as the other (softener and de-salter) are hugely expensive. More on all this later.

[Kelly Thorson]

How does reverse osmosis water equate. I've often wondered if it is suitable for water gilding and mirroring. We use it for all our drinking, coffee machines and irons. It's a whole lot cheaper than distilled water here.

[Kent Smith]

Kelly, reverse osmosis is merely a high pressure filtration operation using a permiable membrane filter. It will only remove heavy salts, minerals and other particulate insoluables including some bacteria. It does not purify the water however and some soluable contaminates will still be in the water which will make it unsuitable for silvering.

[Kelly Thorson]

Thanks Kent.