In a recent post I shared with you Celie Fago's exciting announcement about PMC 960, a mixture of half PMC Sterling and half PMC3 that has greater strength than PMC3 alone but, unlike sterling silver clay, can be fired on an open kiln shelf rather than in activated carbon.
Understandably, metal clay artists (including me!) are very excited about this new material. Several of them asked whether it was possible to substitute PMC+ for PMC3 in the 960 mixture, so Celie decided to try an experiment and share her findings about the differences between the original mixture of PMC Sterling with PMC3 and the experimental mixture of PMC Sterling with PMC+. In the comparison she refers to the two mixtures respectively as 3/960 and +960.
She found that the only real drawback of using +960 vs. the original 3/960 formula is that it isn't as strong, but it's still definitely stronger than PMC+ alone. It's also less sticky and takes texture better than the 3/960 formula.
I strongly encourage you to read Celie's blog post about her PMC+ 960 experiment, which contains a detailed comparison of the characteristics of that formula vs. the original PMC 960 made with PMC3 and also vs. straight PMC+ and PMC3.
Many thanks to Celie for being so generous with her knowledge and for doing this experiment in response to a question from the metal clay community!
Showing posts with label Celie Fago. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celie Fago. Show all posts
New PMC 960 combines the best of fine silver and sterling silver metal clay!
I just finished reading a new blog post by my dear friend and metal clay & polymer clay mentor Celie Fago that left me so excited I can hardly type! So excited, in fact, that I didn't want to wait until tomorrow morning to share the news about this new silver clay formula that you can mix yourself from two commercially available PMC silver clay formulas.
PMC Sterling has a lot of terrific characteristics. It's much stronger than fine silver clay, making it ideal for applications like ring shanks, thin snakes, coils, tendrils, etc., and it's also much easier to carve without chipping. But it also has some significant drawbacks, the primary one being that PMC Sterling needs to be fired in activated carbon. A carbon firing requirement is a major deterrent to using any metal clay formula. Not only is carbon firing longer, more time consuming and messier, clay formulas that require carbon firing tend to have a much narrower and less forgiving firing schedule range within which they will sinter properly. That's one of the reasons we all love working with fine silver clay - it's so easy, and comparatively fast, to sinter it successfully!
About 1.5 years ago, Celie, Tim McCreight and a few other artists were brainstorming about PMC Sterling when Tim came up with the idea of enriching PMC Sterling with more fine silver. Brilliant! Celie has been experimenting with the formula that she and those colleagues have been calling "960", which is made by mixing equal parts of fine silver PMC and PMC Sterling clay to create a clay with the best of both worlds: excellent strength, easy to carve, sinters with minimum distortion, and one-phase firing on an open kiln shelf without the need for activated carbon. Celie also has found that, as one would expect, the higher silver content allows sintered "PMC 960" to bond more readily to gold keum-boo foil than PMC Sterling. And because this new alloy formula produces .960 silver metal after it has sintered, it can be marked sterling silver legally.
Celie's work is absolutely exquisite, and "960" has become her silver clay of choice for most applications. She recently taught a class in which she had her students mix up and use their own batches of "960" clay, and she says the students gave this enriched silver clay formula "rave reviews."
"PMC 960" is a cinch to mix up, and it seems to me to be a significant breakthrough. I can't wait to try it myself!
"PMC 960" is a cinch to mix up, and it seems to me to be a significant breakthrough. I can't wait to try it myself!
To learn more about this new formula and Celie's experiences with it (not to mention viewing the extraordinary work she's doing with it), run - don't walk - and check out her detailed blog post:
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