Hi Bill. I have been gas welding, brazing & silver soldering since I was a boy on the farm 6o odd years ago. I have never had a burn on my hands through the process of actually welding. The occasional blister by being stupid and picking some thing up before it cooled is usually the problem Any of the welders gloves should be OK for silver soldering. A decent pair of tongs or pliers for moving things around should stop any accidents. I rarely use gloves and then only on my left hand when gas welding unless using very short pieces of rod but I usually join them so they are more than a foot long.

regards

Hard question to answer Bill when I don't know the size of work you are attempting but several things occur to me. BTW, most of my fabrication & boiler work is relatively small and very large boiler work will present more challenges.

The first thing is that I try to apply the solder 'pallets' before I apply the heat where ever possible. This not only helps to minimise the amount of solder used but also means that you are not feeding solder in and your hand will not therefore get hot! Where I do need to feed the solder in, I do so only once the work is hot enough, so again my hand isn't near the radiant heat for too long, so doesn't tend to get that hot (I don't generally wear gloves either).

However, there have been a few occasions where (even with gloves) things were getting a bit warm and I've got a simple heat shield made from tinplate. It's just a square of tinplate (with a hole in it to poke the solder through) and it's very light to use and certainly helps deflect the heat. Most of the time however, I don't find it necessary.

Regards,

IanT

Edited By IanT on 29/12/2019 12:51:28

I've never worn heat protection on my hands when silver soldering or bronze brazing and never needed it.

What torch with what length of neck tube are you using? And assuming you stick-feed the solder into the work rather than lay on paillons before applying heat, how long a stick of solder are you using to feed with? If you do use short sticks you can hold them in mole grips to keep your feeding hand well away from the heat.

Gloves can be a hot topic – pun intended. I very rarely wear gloves except when I’m handling hot metal, and then only Blacksmith style – one glove. I did a government training course many years ago and gloves were forbidden in most departments but especially those that required the use of rotating equipment. If you watch enough YouTube videos you’ll see that the Americans are completely nuts about wearing gloves even if they’re only using something like a screwdriver. I read a post on a forum some time back with arguments flying backwards and forwards about the dangers of wearing not only gloves but also jewellery like rings and bracelets when wood turning. Apparently many over there have to wear gloves when wood turning because the chips can get a little bit warm …

You could try holding the filler rod from further back so as not to get heat soak off the rod.