Indeed, the biggest benefit to running at PCBCart.com is the hard gold. The quality of lesser board houses is still usually acceptable for most other features. PCBCart's silkscreen process is also much better, so if you've got a silkscreen layer that requires high precision, they're a good choice too. Their big cost-increaser is the one time tooling fee, which of course goes away if you run the board more than once with no changes. But, even with all that, a medium-sized run of any full-featured board with PCBCart.com is still an order of magnitude cheaper than it was, say, 10 years ago! W.R.T. non-hard gold plating on new boards, unless the board needs to be ENIG anyway (fine pitch surface mount), I wouldn't bother. It's my personal opinion that running ENIG and showing off a gold-colored card edge connector is somewhat dishonest. I know of *cough* at least one seller of 8-bit ISA IDE interfaces *cough* who pulls that business, and then charges more for a much smaller board that lacks proper plating. I'm not 100% convinced that the "thicker ENIG" some board houses offer is any more than a scam anyway, since the immersion gold process in ENIG is an ion swap -- how could one possibly swap more gold ions once the nickel layer is coated? Thanks, Jonathan On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 1:44 PM, Henry S. Courbis via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Herb,
You can usually request boards in varying thicknesses of gold plating. Most will "flash" gold to a pin for cheap I have found. It does kind of look like gold, but as you said it's thin and won't withstand any real abuse. I always request 2u" (.002 mils) of plating on edge connectors. This isn't as good as hard gold, however I have tested a board with 100 inserts and removals with no issues. And it may even make 200 times, but I never tested that far. So that seemed a good compromise on price and longevity.
Of course this doesn't help if you have boards already made. In the future I can recommend MakerFabs.com for low runs and even assembly. Jonathan's recommendation of PCBCart.com is also a good outfit but at a higher price. Quality was slightly better I believe, but not amazingly so. However they do offer hard gold as an option and at a good price too.
$.02
Henry S. Courbis
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On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 9:39 AM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Thanks, Corey for the info on that pen technology. Prices seem to be higher than you suggest. I'll email you with some questions, I'll share some results - don't want to clutter this list with details.
Also thanks, Jonathan, same deal. The boards I'm getting are not expensive, I think making one or two of my own would not be cheap. We can discuss wear and tear on edge connectors. I deal with some of those issues on my Web site, some pages discuss use of cleaner/lubricants like DeOxit on corroded IC sockets and (solder/tin coated) IC pins.
Metal plating is interesting technology. And it's a means to repair some vintage equipment, so it's relevant here.
herb
-- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net