Cobalt-hardened gold was developed to get around nickel-hardened gold patents
held by one company.  All electronic hardware was gold plated at that time.
When the cobalt hardened process became available, many US industries
switched to it because the cost was slightly cheaper and specified it for
their product.  I did considerable testing of comparisons of platings on
electronic plated hardware and circuit boards and found no functional
difference.  Gold was only $35 dollars per troy ounce in those days and the
charge for formulation and making it into a plating salt was about $10 for
the nickel and $8 for the cobalt.

Phil Hinton

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet
To temporarily halt delivery of Technet send the following message: SET Technet NOMAIL
Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives
Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional
information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------