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All right, so we will talk about solder. What is solder? It is a low melting point metal;
it is generally an alloy of two metals, lead and tin, the lead is what gives it a low melting
point. Solder, you will find when you go shopping for it, there are a lot of different kinds
and they are not all really suited for stained glass. For stained glass it is good to have
a large diameter solder such as this, I mean this is, looks like a, oh a, this is well,
I don’t know looks like it is about an eighth inch in diameter so it is kind of a nice thick
solder and it is also sixty percent tin and forty percent lead which is also a really
good kind of percentage especially for doing foil work. You can also find it in fifty-fifty
which is maybe better for doing lead and lead can but um, so find a high diameter, sixty-forty
lead and then the last thing is, is you will that some solders that are sold for other
purposes have a core and you can usually read it right on the label, have a core of either
rosin or acid and you kind of don’t want to use those, because they just don’t really
work that well with stained glass, they work well for other applications but when you shop
for solder just remember that not all solders are created equal. I mean you will find some
solder, solders that have a lot thinner diameter on the piece that comes off the spool and
so obviously you need to kind of need to add a lot more heat and melt a lot more of it
to get the same size bead. So that is why it is kind of nice for stained glass to have
kind of a thicker diameter solder. Sixty-forty tin to lead is a pretty good proportion, you
don’t want to use rosin core or acid core. It generally comes on a spool like this; this
one is about half empty so there would have been more on this one when we started. And
so we’ll show you later on in the series how to use it but that is what you need to
know about solder.