Gold Plated Pins

[silversaddle1]

As you guys know, I've pulled millions of pins in the 17 years that I have been doing it. Some say it's a waste of time but I enjoy doing it in my little spare time. Out in the shop alone, put some Pink Floyd on and just relax and enjoy myself. Utopia! Back onto track here. I've seen these types of pins before. And if I recall correctly, they come out of the old "Buss & Tagg" type connectors. I'm not 100% sure but they sure look like the male pins. If so, we are looking at 70's vintage, enterprise type pins. If I'm correct, I had 30 pounds of them at one time.

 

[snoman701]

Snoman, thanks for sharing your experience. I thought the details of how the samples were prepared were particularly interesting. I will probably never process the exact same material you did, so the yield numbers aren't as significant to me as the process, but I'm only speaking for myself.

Dave

I think I'm going to do an induction melter build, so you'll get more of the process on that side. I've spent some time studying them, and was initially looking for an old one, but it's just not worth it. From a control side, there's really not much to them. It's just a PWM, phase lock loop on the feedback controlling a giant IGBT. The stupid snubber capacitors will be the expensive part.

This gentleman takes an interesting pin sample as well. He uses a piece of quartz tubing, submerges the tip in the same manor as a regular vacuum pin, then very quickly pulls a sample using a turkey baster. It's the exact same process, just a different spin. Plus, if you are lucky and the pin slides out easy, you can use the same piece of quartz tube quite a few times.

I asked him for a couple pieces of tubing and got the warning, "I make this look really easy but there is a bit of coordination to it". And after he described it, it's clear that his likely hundreds of thousands of melts over the last 30 years has taught him the muscle memory to make it appear really really easy.

Then the XRF is another amazement to me in and of itself. The more I learn, the more I love it. I spent 45 minutes today talking to him about errors, analysis of results, the differences between machines and their limitations. In time, as I gain a greater understanding of it, I'm going to write up a review of XRF and analysis of precious metals, give it to him to proof, then post it. Absolutely amazing tool. He's been using XRF, in one form or another, since 1982.

 

[goldsilverpro]

A guy I worked for taught me the turkey baster, glass tubing, thing 20 years ago. Worked great. In fact, I've discussed it several times on the forum.

No matter what, the results you got are unreliable. To me, if you can't hold the resulting pure gold in your hand, the result is questionable. Any digital result is potential garbage.

 

[snoman701]

A guy I worked for taught me the turkey baster, glass tubing, thing 20 years ago. Worked great. In fact, I've discussed it several times on the forum.

No matter what, the results you got are unreliable. To me, if you can't hold the resulting pure gold in your hand, the result is questionable. Any digital result is potential garbage.

Yes, the results are always potentially unreliable...especially so without a skilled analyst that understands the limitations of his instrument.

And yes, gravimetric methods to determine gold purity still remain to be the gold standard, or at least the standard of the American Society for Testing and Materials.

 

[g_axelsson]

Jumping into the debate here...

The pins doesn't look to be solid to me. If it is made from a wrapped sheet then there isn't a lot of base metal there and both sides that is plated. That in it self would increase the yield in percent compared to most pins that are massive.

I have no reason to doubt the numbers Snoman presents. There will always be the one anomalous sample that if it is only one type of pins the batch can be way off compared to mixed pins.

I once scrapped an old IBM system 3 machine. The connectors were nothing like I've ever seen before and the foils never swirled around after the base metals were dissolved, it just sank straight to the bottom. That machine gave me a 10 gram button.
Since that day I have kept looking for that kind of connector and now and then I find them too, but I have never managed to duplicate the yield from the first batch, it's always been normal gold plate on every connector I found since then.

I actually found the male pins that I harvested from that IBM back plane, I only processed the female connectors back at the time and the box with the male pins resurfaced two weeks ago. I'm looking forward to process these pins now. Half of the pins are gold plated while half looks like stainless steel but I suspect and hopes for some sort of PGM plating.

I also have pins from an Olivetti "calculator" from mid 1960:es that I'm also going to process. Thin gold plated steel wire... never run into that connector again either.

Göran

 

[snoman701]

Goran...are you talking about the ones with the little square gold pads on them when you reference the system 3 pins?

 

[g_axelsson]

Goran...are you talking about the ones with the little square gold pads on them when you reference the system 3 pins?

Yes, that's the ones, where the gold plated pad is spot welded to the end of a bent brass piece.
One time they were made from thick gold but since that it's been standard gold plate every time I've checked.

Göran

 

[goldsilverpro]

Thinking about this further. They appear to be unused and could be rejects from a manufacturing facility. If so, I guess they could be rejected due to gold overplating, although I've never seen that happen before unless it caused dimensional or stress problems.

Even in the most advanced production setups, there is still some "art" in any application of electroplating. The plating bath you will use tomorrow is never, ever identical to the same bath you used today.

 

[snoman701]

My goal here was simply to establish approximate values of pins for purchasing knowledge. I grabbed what I figured where the highest I had, and the lowest I had. If the assay is correct, clearly I succeeded on one side. Unfortunately, the data is pretty useless, as I'll probably never find pins like this again. After talking to a couple of people privately, it's clear that this number is not only high, but ridiculously high compared to even the best pins.

With that, there's a couple things going on.

First, the pins I showed were not the ones that I were actually melted. From memory, they are identical, but the stress from Dad really killed my memory, so my memory is shot these days. So the value of sheen in this case is very unreliable.

Second is exactly what you said. I get some prototype material. The quantity I got was perfect to do enough testing to determine applicability, but not nearly enough to do a production study. When production pins used to come in from the wiring harness companies, they are on reels...and they usually come in with all of the tooling to crimp them. Those haven't come in a couple of years unfortunately. I'd still say that 98% of that was nickel plated only though.

 

[nickvc]

The one thought I had was if the pins were very light but had been plated to a military spec or above the results could make some sense, the best e scrap material I ever ran was yielding around 90 grams a kilo, it was a rare find but it happened several times with the exact same material.

 

[Claudie]

the best e scrap material I ever ran was yielding around 90 grams a kilo

What was the material?

 

[nickvc]

It came from some military application I believe, never had anything else like it.

 

[goldsilverpro]

The highest value pins I've seen were from WWII and they ran 1 tr.oz./pound. The highest fingers I've had ran about 7g/pound. A place I worked ran about 1000# of small, gold-plated, Kovar IC package lids that were new and had a Au/Sn preform mounted on them. They ran 1 oz/pound

 

[philddreamer]

I've processed a couple hundred pounds of different types of pins. The highest yield per pound were the ones I toll refined for a fellow member from Baltimore back in 2013,
http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=84&t=17438&p=176534&hilit=Bryan#p176534
almost 1 T oz per pound!
I wish I could come across some more of them!

Take care!
Phil

 

[Claudie]

Does anyone here know the yield of the small Gold plated balls that are found in the (usually red or blue) switches from circuit boards?
I know it takes a bunch of switches to acquire the quantity of balls needed to determine yield.

 

[kernels]

Does anyone here know the yield of the small Gold plated balls that are found in the (usually red or blue) switches from circuit boards?
I know it takes a bunch of switches to acquire the quantity of balls needed to determine yield.

From this video https://youtu.be/pi9VOfsGbqg it looks like the balls hold together reasonably well, so the plating thickness must be decent. No idea what the overall yield would be though.

 

[Claudie]

Thank you kernels.
I have seen many of this guy's videos but I missed that one. I have a jar with several of these balls mixed in with other small, fully plated pieces. I also have several switches that I haven't taken apart yet. Maybe I can get enough of them together to estimate an average yield.

 

[glorycloud]

This is a post that I did from 2009 inquiring about the gold balls in the red switches. 8)

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4596