paulk
New member
Hello all. New member here. Recovering gold from plated items has had my interest for a bunch of years. Decades ago, while rumaging through surplus electronics, I came across several gold-plated boxes which were used to house electronic circuits. These boxes were of high quality and made of thick aluminum (I know because of the weight of the units) and plated with gold over all surfaces, inside and out. The boxes were machined before being plated. If you look at them with the bottom turned up, they look like gold bricks. They are approximately 8 inches long, 3 inches wide and 2 inches deep each. Recent checking tells me that gold has to be plated to an alloy and not directly to aluminum. I've also read that chemically stripping the gold from the boxes is not a possibility and that the plating is usually very thin and not worth the time and expense to use electrolysis. Just wondering if there is any reason to pursue the idea of recovering the gold from these boxes. Thanks.