Posted on 10/25/2011 6:02:24 AM PDT by knarf
Years ago, I remember hearing that there was a minute quantity of gold in certain television tuners or channel selectors ...
.. and if so .. which ones and where?
Gold is used in many electronic devices because of its good conductivity. Not worth your effort but some companies have made some money by being recyclers of things like pc boards and other parts. Plenty of other stuff inside television sets that are older to avoid.
I’ve never looked into it, as the quantities are so minute and extraction would likely be cost-prohibitive and a little dangerous.
But, generally speaking, gold is used on contact surfaces in my experience. Places like board interfaces, plugs and sockets, etc. These are the points at which many electronics fail as they are just mechanical contact bonds (as opposed to something like soldering) and subject to corrosion leaching into the contact interface and disrupting the conduction. Gold doesn’t corrode under normal circumstances, so these interfaces remain stable.
But the layer of gold is extremely thin.
Gold is often flashed onto the pins of connectors in low voltage, low energy circuits. It prevents tarnishing.
You could go to the store right now, and find video cable with gold tips. I assume its electroplated...and the energy require to melt it down to try and get it would probably cost more than the gold is worth....the entire cable costing only around 15 bucks.
The gold used in connector pins has a thickness of about 50 microinches. The manufacturers of circuit boards used to use much thicker deposits, but when the cost of gold zoomed the manufacturers cut back. That’s why the once-common practice of using Pink Pearl erasers to polish connections is a long-terminated “best practice”. By the way, gold plating on PCI expansion board connector tongues is a sign of quality — cheaper boards don’t use gold.
I would rather hit the black sands in a certain part of Australia.
trying to strip gold from old electronics will cause a EPA SWAT team to drop in on a person.
As a former Hi-Fi salesman, that one cracks me up.
BTW, I never spend more than a few bucks for an HDMI cable. The prices some of them command just plain cracks me up. Ignorance can cost you a bundle.
I've heard that what can drive up the cost is a good plug that can handle a lot of use. If you plan on connecting it to the TV and leaving it there for five years until you get a new TV the cheap cable is more than enough. On the other hand if you move the TV daily then either get a good cable or a lot of spares. One problem is that though good cables are expensive, there are many bad cables that are just as expensive and it is difficult to tell the difference without doing some destructive testing to see what really lasts.
Computer motherboards and CPUs use gold, since it can be made into extremely thin cables. It’s probably not much, very hard to extract, and worth more in the component than by weight, though.
You have Internet access and you have to post such a question HERE first!? Why would you not query for “electronics recycling gold” first? Its been a popular recycling method since at least the late 70s.
—If you plan on connecting it to the TV and leaving it there for five years until you get a new TV the cheap cable is more than enough.—
You nailed it. I am also a musician and have learned (the hard way) why some cables are more expensive than others. However, I’m a do-it-yourselfer so I can repair bad cable ends pretty fast, and cheap.
But you are absolutely right about a legitimate reason why one cable can, and should be more expensive than another. Low oxygen and other similar claims are hype.
Oh, another legitimate reason is cable thickness, especially when dealing with speaker cables. But if I go where I want to with this I’ll drag us into the weeds. :-D
THAT'S why.
Some analog tuners used gold contacts, but I doubt you could find any today, everything is digital.
So .. I guess it's safe to throw my 8 or 10 year old, $40 WalMart VCR away and not feel like I've lost anything.
My standard operating procedure is to disassemble these types of things when they no longer work. I put all the fasteners in a can and save anything that looks cool that I convince myself could be used in the future for something else(don’t know what). Surely some day after spending hours searching through the can I’ll find a screw I need to fix something and save myself a trip to the hardware store and a nickel.
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