You can obtain the plating solution and electroplate everything in one go if you're able to solder a bond wire across the traces to the edge fingers at some point. At the board fab, this is usually accomplished with a tab off the bottom of the edge connector that is routed off later, but I've got some hobbyist-made S-100 boards where someone soldered a wire across the traces right above the edge connector and did gold plating in an immersion bath themselves (unfortunately they didn't know they needed nickel, so the copper has migrated into the gold!). It's been my experience that, long-term, ENIG boards *will* require cleaning of the edge connectors once the gold plating is worn through. This is of course a very small sample size (two or three boards) in a prototype project where the boards were inserted and removed a lot. In that sense, it's no better than HASL since it requires cleaning. If it's a design you have Gerber files for, it may be cheaper to just run it at a board house that actually does selective hard gold plating. I use PCB Cart for the XT-IDE boards, which is where John Monahan/s100computers.com runs their production boards. Quality is very good and the hard gold plating holds up well. Thanks, Jonathan On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 9:56 AM, Christian Liendo via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Wow that's cool. I am assuming this is it
http://www.cohler.com/pro-lcd-pen-plater.html
On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 6:23 AM, corey cohen via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
There is a company out there that produced a rechargeable gold plating pen for about $50 to $75 called the wizard pro. They also have a cheap disposable version that can be had for about $20. the real cost is the plating solution. That can range from $75 and up.
I use mine all the time to clean vintage “solder” slips when I’m fixing vintage stuff and to fix worn connector plating. Trick is to not contaminate your solution so it lasts and warm the solution a bit before plating. Otherwise pretty easy. I even gold plated my 11 year olds Timex watch in some spots so it matches the look of my vintage hyperaqualand dive watch so we have father and son dive watches. :-)
If you want to try it out let me know I can bring it to one of the workshops, just not the next one coming up, I have a lacrosse thing that weekend.
Cheers, Corey
corey cohen uǝɥoɔ ʎǝɹoɔ