So, I'm obtaining a recently-made PC board, which was produced by some PC board house from Gerber files, the usual sort of small-run hobby project. This particular board, was with ENIG plating on board and fingers. This means, a micron-thick plating of gold over 150-200 microns of nickel, mostly for better soldering and copper protection. But that also "covers" the edge-connector fingers, they are not heavier gold. What's out there, for adding gold to those fingers? There's a good number of them, not just a dozen or two. I"m bothering to ask the question here, because it's a "vintage repair" problem also. A solution for one or two fingers, is a solution for many. Or, tell me "nickel isn't so bad, don't insert and remove it every day, you'll be fine". No, I won't spend $300, $600 for a gold-plating electro-pen system. If someone has that and wants to give me a quote, I'm all ears, tell me how many microns you'll plate. No, I won't mix up cyanide solutions, not likely to use nitric acid; it's outside my experiences and one "oops" could really ruin my day. I don't expect to rub gold-leaf on fingers and glue them down, that won't last. I may well go to some PC board shop and ask them for a quote, maybe someone has done that. So - what do people here know-of, from repair experiences or their own experiences? I have looked around the Web, there's means of doing these things, but it's hard to judge them "cold". And of course, it's hard to search on "hobbyist covering PCB edge connector with gold", there's many people selling products or showing how they mess with aqua regia or coat quarters with microns of gold. Herb "Goldfinger" Johnson retrotechnology.com -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
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.
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
On Apr 19, 2018, at 5:38 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
So, I'm obtaining a recently-made PC board, which was produced by some PC board house from Gerber files, the usual sort of small-run hobby project. This particular board, was with ENIG plating on board and fingers. This means, a micron-thick plating of gold over 150-200 microns of nickel, mostly for better soldering and copper protection. But that also "covers" the edge-connector fingers, they are not heavier gold.
What's out there, for adding gold to those fingers? There's a good number of them, not just a dozen or two. I"m bothering to ask the question here, because it's a "vintage repair" problem also. A solution for one or two fingers, is a solution for many. Or, tell me "nickel isn't so bad, don't insert and remove it every day, you'll be fine".
No, I won't spend $300, $600 for a gold-plating electro-pen system. If someone has that and wants to give me a quote, I'm all ears, tell me how many microns you'll plate. No, I won't mix up cyanide solutions, not likely to use nitric acid; it's outside my experiences and one "oops" could really ruin my day. I don't expect to rub gold-leaf on fingers and glue them down, that won't last. I may well go to some PC board shop and ask them for a quote, maybe someone has done that.
So - what do people here know-of, from repair experiences or their own experiences? I have looked around the Web, there's means of doing these things, but it's hard to judge them "cold". And of course, it's hard to search on "hobbyist covering PCB edge connector with gold", there's many people selling products or showing how they mess with aqua regia or coat quarters with microns of gold.
Herb "Goldfinger" Johnson retrotechnology.com
-- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
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
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
Yep. That’s it. corey cohen uǝɥoɔ ʎǝɹoɔ
On Apr 20, 2018, at 9:56 AM, Christian Liendo <cliendo@gmail.com> 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
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
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 Office Toll Free: (800) REACTIVE (732-2848) Office/Mobile Direct: (856) 779-1900 www.ReActiveMicro.com <http://www.ReactiveMicro.com> - Sales, Support, and News, Our Headquarters on the Internet ReActiveMicro.com/wiki - Support, Software, Manuals, and History. Create your own page today! Facebook.com/reactivemicrousa - Our Social Media Outlet and Support 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
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
Office Toll Free: (800) REACTIVE (732-2848) Office/Mobile Direct: (856) 779-1900 www.ReActiveMicro.com <http://www.ReactiveMicro.com> - Sales, Support, and News, Our Headquarters on the Internet ReActiveMicro.com/wiki - Support, Software, Manuals, and History. Create your own page today! Facebook.com/reactivemicrousa - Our Social Media Outlet and Support
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
participants (6)
-
Christian Liendo -
corey cohen -
David Gesswein -
Henry S. Courbis -
Herb Johnson -
systems_glitch