Silver soldering

[init]

Hey guys, bit of an odd question. I want to solder to a piece of pure silver ~99% in some way that I can interface with an IC. So perhaps go from silver to silver solder to a pcb pad. From what I can see, silver solder melts at around ~700 C so I'm guessing a conventional electronics soldering iron wouldn't be able to get hot enough. Is the only way to do this with a blow torch? Can silver solder chemically form bonds with copper or Sn/Pb solder? If I need to get to ~700C to melt the silver solder with the PCB pad, would it damage the PCB?

[SeanB]

Silver will definitely solder with regular solder, and will easily solder to a PCB using regular electronics solders. Just be aware you will need a lot of heat if the silver mass is large. No need for any exotic silver laden solder, it will dissolve in the regular solder quite easily at the regular tin solder melting point. Just use a bit of flux to improve wetting and clean well afterwards. Do not use acid or borax based flux, it will eat the copper traces, but 5o solder a coin to a PCB just regular solder and hot air to get the coin to solder melting works fine.

[init]

Silver will definitely solder with regular solder, and will easily solder to a PCB using regular electronics solders. Just be aware you will need a lot of heat if the silver mass is large. No need for any exotic silver laden solder, it will dissolve in the regular solder quite easily at the regular tin solder melting point. Just use a bit of flux to improve wetting and clean well afterwards. Do not use acid or borax based flux, it will eat the copper traces, but 5o solder a coin to a PCB just regular solder and hot air to get the coin to solder melting works fine.

Thanks for the reply. That's good to hear, it will make it a lot easier (and cheaper) 

[T3sl4co1l]

FYI, the customary language is probably confusing:

"Silver solder" or "hard solder" refers to a medium-melting braze alloy, based on silver (usually combined with copper, zinc and others).  Melting points are in the red-hot range.

"Silver bearing solder" refers to a tin and/or lead based alloy, which contains silver to increase strength.  (Because it's stronger, it might also be considered "hard" in comparison to other soft solders, so beware of this too.)

For electrical soldering, you'll be doing the latter, soft soldering, because of the required low melting point.  To stick to silver metal, absolutely any alloy is fine.  The silver metal will be dissolved somewhat (let it soak a while, and even if you started with plain Sn60 or whatever alloy, you'll now have silver-bearing ), but that's only a problem on plated layers.  You'd have to wash it with a lot of solder to dissolve much of a bulk item.

Tim