On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 05:38:16PM -0400, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Or, tell me "nickel isn't so bad, don't insert and remove it every day, you'll be fine".
Haven't done any gold replating to give you first hand on that. I did do the ENIG gold on a edge connector circuit board. The edge connectors have been on and off a number of times. It looks like the gold has worn through noticably. On the connector one side is all grounds. I measured through a cable plugged in the restance between pin pairs and they were constant and about expected from the cable resistance so it looks like the nickel is working ok as a contact though nickel oxide film is supposed to be poor conductor. Board is a couple years old. With one data point if the consequence of bad contacts is low and used in benign enviornment just living with it may be ok. Report I saw online indicated connector lubricant can help lifetime of gold plating and contact resistance change. Got to be better than the TRS-80 expansion connector.