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!
I love when others do these experiments for us. It helps guarantee our success. Celie is obviously very responsive to her fellow jewelry artists. Thanks for sharing her findings.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure, Diana! Celie not only is an amazing artist and teacher but also is very generous with her knowledge. I'm tremendously grateful that she shares so much so openly.
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