# Is this gold plated?



## Dioalma (Feb 9, 2017)

They are part of cell phone antenas.

And if so, would you guys add this to the main gold batch?


----------



## rickbb (Feb 9, 2017)

They appear to be, most connectors like that are. Usually you should process them either in a sulfuric de-plating cell or the same as plated pins. 

You should not process them with plated circuit boards as the base metals are a steel alloy that will contaminate your solution used on PCB's.


----------



## haveagojoe (Feb 9, 2017)

> You should not process them with plated circuit boards as the base metals are a steel alloy that will contaminate your solution used on PCB's.



I find AP works well on these but it takes time; I like to run boards and fingers first because they are relatively clean, just gold plated over copper. Then I reuse the AP for this kind of stuff. 

When flakes are visible in the solution I agitate the connectors to release as much as possible and then filter out the flakes even if the rest of the plating is still on the connectors. That way I get a good portion of the gold out before the acid has much of a chance to attack the base metal underneath. After the first filtering I put the connectors back in for another go the release the rest of the plating. Sometimes I will do this 3 times until all the plating is released, but by that point the solution is heavy with copper and pretty contaminated with other metals which can all precipitate as a layer of white stuff at the bottom. So then I filter off as much as possible of the settled solution and add plain HCl to redissolve the precipitated copper and other metals. It can be hard to separate the flakes from the white stuff but at the tail end of the digestion I have already recovered most of the gold reasonably cleanly in separate filters.


----------



## DylanDownright84 (Mar 15, 2017)

Found similar stuff in an old desktop tower and as brilliant as the pins look, they appear solid. They test as 14k and one of them melted down rather quickly when I put it in the crucible. Thoughts?


----------



## haveagojoe (Mar 15, 2017)

Sadly they are not solid gold hahaha! Just a thin plating which itself is only 14k. Treat them the same as the others. Try to obtain large volumes, you will really need a lot of this type of stuff before the amount of gold you can recover is even visible. It' a good idea to soak them in plain HCl for a few days to get rid of any solder before they go into AP. This will make the work easier later on.


----------



## nickvc (Mar 15, 2017)

haveagojoe said:


> Sadly they are not solid gold hahaha! Just a thin plating which itself is only 14k. Treat them the same as the others. Try to obtain large volumes, you will really need a lot of this type of stuff before the amount of gold you can recover is even visible. It' a good idea to soak them in plain HCl for a few days to get rid of any solder before they go into AP. This will make the work easier later on.




You have one point wrong there, they are not 14k plated but plated with near fine gold, the reason they test as 14 k is the base metals underneath the gold.


----------



## g_axelsson (Mar 15, 2017)

Dylan, do not doublepost. Your other post have been removed.

Ant yes, it is plated with 99% pure gold but very thin.

Göran


----------



## goldsilverpro (Mar 15, 2017)

About the only solid gold that exists in electronic scrap are the yellow bonding wires attached to the chip. The only exception I remember seeing in 50 years were some very rare tiny pins about 1/8" long. Any thing yellow you see will most likely be gold plating and its value, at a $1200 gold spot, will usually vary between $0.04 and $0.40 per square inch of plated area. About the only items at the high end of this spread are parts that experience wear, like circuit board fingers or connector pins. At the low end you will find items like the large plane areas on cell phone boards - or other items that do not experience wear.

There are exceptions to the above, but very few.


----------



## DylanDownright84 (Mar 17, 2017)

Thanks everyone! Sorry Bout the double post, still getting acquainted with the site and posting process.


----------



## DylanDownright84 (Mar 17, 2017)

I just recently got into the e-scrap part of my hobby and have only been able to play with a single laptop and a single desktop. I've trimmed all the fingers and whatnot, but those brightly colored pins in the pic came off of a sound card from the desktop. I immediately noticed how much brighter they were than what was plated on the other parts. I did a few searches, nothing came up, but my wishful thinking took over and here I am.


----------



## Topher_osAUrus (Mar 18, 2017)

goldsilverpro said:


> very rare tiny pins about 1/8" long...
> ...There are exceptions to the above, but very few.



Do you remember their applications? What they were from/for?

Would you say most of those exceptions are almost solely in the aeronautics and space fields?

A show I was watching the other day, showed a satellite being made... Incredible the amount of gold that appeared to be used.


----------



## goldscraphobby (Mar 18, 2017)

Yes they do not hold back on gold for space applications. Most of my stuff is from that and you can see here how much I recovered from one item. 6.9g
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=20355&start=30


----------



## goldsilverpro (Mar 18, 2017)

Although there are exceptions, bright shiny gold plating is usually thinner that duller, matte gold plating.


----------



## Topher_osAUrus (Mar 18, 2017)

goldscraphobby said:


> Yes they do not hold back on gold for space applications. Most of my stuff is from that and you can see here how much I recovered from one item. 6.9g
> http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=20355&start=30



Very nice!
That was a good read. End up getting all of them processed?

I will take a picture of the satellite I saw being constructed whenever I get control of the tv back from the kids..


----------



## g_axelsson (Mar 18, 2017)

One of the most extreme applications of precious metals in space science must be the LISA Pathfinder mission of ESA.
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Test_cubes_floating_freely_inside_LISA_Pathfinder
Two 46 mm massive cubes of a platinum gold alloy in free fall inside the satellite.
http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2015/11/Inside_LISA_Pathfinder_with_narration

... I wonder if there is an engineering sample of that satellite that is going to recycling... :mrgreen: 

Göran


----------



## goldscraphobby (Mar 18, 2017)

I did the larger ones. I still have a lot of small ones, connector shells, nuts, screws, washers etc. that still have to do.


----------



## DylanDownright84 (Mar 18, 2017)

Hey Joe, should I soak everything (fingers, pins, etc) in muriatic acid? And for how long? Sorry, I'm still a noob. Thanks.


----------



## flyfisherman (Mar 22, 2017)

goldsilverpro said:


> About the only solid gold that exists in electronic scrap are the yellow bonding wires attached to the chip. The only exception I remember seeing in 50 years were some very rare tiny pins about 1/8" long. Any thing yellow you see will most likely be gold plating and its value, at a $1200 gold spot, will usually vary between $0.04 and $0.40 per square inch of plated area. About the only items at the high end of this spread are parts that experience wear, like circuit board fingers or connector pins. At the low end you will find items like the large plane areas on cell phone boards - or other items that do not experience wear.
> 
> There are exceptions to the above, but very few.


One of the exception is the old Soviet(1970-80s) relay's. There is a video on youtube where guy from Russia brake one apart. There is two types- one with pure gold contacts inside and the other type has pure platinum contacts. Some relay has like 0.2g of gold or more.


----------



## teclu (Mar 23, 2017)

Hello, flyfisherman,

I do not know exactly what you saw(on youtube) but it's not Pt .999

Those below have come under my hammer 

Russian relays contacts:

*Au*
Au .999 only RES10 and RES9 type!(between 65 mg/relay and 130 mg/relay)

Other (russian) types of relays(aprox. 25 types), have gold alloy contacts( gold .999 in aloy/ relay between 30mg /relay and 800 mg/relay)

*Gold alloys in russian contacts relays*
AuPt10
AuPd18(yes, white color )
AuAg25
AuNi5

*Pt*
Is not Pt .999 , is PtRh10, PtIr10 and PtIr30(Pt .999 in alloy contacts is between 20 mg/relay and 1800 mg/relay)

*Pd*
Is not Pd .999, is PdIr5, PdW10 and PdAg40

*Ir*
Is not Ir .999, is IrPt30 and IrPd45

*Ag*
Ag .999, AgPd40, AgPd20 and AgPd10


...that's all

teclu


----------



## haveagojoe (Mar 23, 2017)

DylanDownright84 
Hey, 
I usually separate out anything which has solder on it and soak it in HCl until the solder has disappeared. This can take between 3-4 days up to 2 weeks depending on how much solder there is. I do it in a large plastic container without adding heat or an air bubbler. You could speed up the process with either or both of these, just make sure you do it safely. The reason for doing this is to remove as much of the silver and tin as possible early on in the process so it does not cause problems later on.


----------



## haveagojoe (Mar 23, 2017)

sorry, correction - don't use a bubbler if you are just dissolving solder into HCl. if you do there is a risk you might introduce enough oxygen to start dissolving copper and forming copper chloride, which will dissolve all the rest of the copper and release the foils into the solution. you don't want that yet. just plain HCl, heat if you want to speed it up, then when the solder has dissolved, decant the HCl and replace with your AP solution to dissolve the copper and release the foils into relatively clean solution.


----------



## patnor1011 (Mar 23, 2017)

Some version of old czech tesla relays used 14 karat gold buttons as contact points.


----------

