Excellent, Arthur. You're becoming a very good refiner. I very much like your approach and your detail. Also, you don't screw around - you go right after it, with intelligence.
That's $142/pound, which is in the range that I remember. It's always nice to hit a $6,000 lick with a bucket of stuff. The key, of course, was finding those with that gold ring. Some of the newer ones have no gold ring and are virtually worthless, except for, maybe, a little silver. Some of the worthless ones have an aluminum lid. The TO18s, the smaller ones in the second link I gave, will run even higher per pound if they have the gold ring. The TO18s were almost as common as the TO5s. Another key was the gold leads. In knowing how they plate these things, if the leads are gold, the pad will also usually be gold.
You can inspect the insides simply by squeezing the lid with a pair of dull diagonal cutters or pliers and then twisting it off. I use a 10X eye loupe - I always keep a loupe and a magnet handy in my pocket on my key chain. Au/Si solder will usually be seen bled out around the edges of the chip and will usually be a very faint yellow color.
I had forgotten about the insulating gel that is in some of these. I'm glad that you were able to incinerate it successfully.
As a general rule, in all types of packages, when the chip is attached to a gold plated surface (pad), it is attached using Au/Si solder. Since this solder is about 20 times thicker than the gold plating, that's where a lot of the value is. It is similar with the lid. If a gold plated lid is soldered to a gold plated pad or ring, they usually use a Au/Sn solder (braze). In this case, a Kovar lid is soldered to a gold plated pad, so I doubt if this solder on the lid contains gold.
The very pure gold plating on these is about twice, or more, as thick as that on circuit board fingers. To attach the chip, they had to use enough heat to melt the Au/Si solder. During the heating, if the gold were thinner, the heat would migrate some of the underlying metal up through the pores of the thin gold plating and the gold surface would discolor from the base metal oxides. Therefore, as a general rule, anytime a chip is soldered to a gold surface, the plating will be quite thick. Thick gold plate is less porous than thin gold. For the same reason, all metal portions of the header must be covered with gold, including the leads, since any base metal left unplated would discolor from the heat.
I mention these things because the more you learn about how and why different parts are made and assembled, the more success you will have in buying and refining. That has always been my approach. Just remember that there are always exceptions to all general rules in this business.
Chris