Electronics and other manufactured components often require effective plating to ensure efficient operation, corrosion resistance, electrical conductivity, and more. While General Metal Finishing can provide an array of options for customers, including silver plating, electrolytic nickel, tin-lead plating, electropolish, and others, one of our prominent services is offering industrial gold plating.
Our Approach to Gold Electroplating
Companies in diverse fields regularly use our gold electroplating services due to gold’s excellent electrical conductivity properties, premium corrosion resistance, and its ability to improve the durability of a variety of essential components.
For instance, we’ve worked with sectors ranging from electronics to industrial operations to aerospace and defense to the medical field and beyond, regularly plating parts like electronic connectors, printed circuit boards, precision industrial parts and more.
Gold plating services can be broken down into two key types: hard gold plating and soft gold plating.
- Hard Gold Plating – This form of industrial gold plating involves alloying the gold plating with other robust metals like nickel and cobalt to increase the final material’s hardness and resistance to wear. The result is a material well suited for applications that feature high mechanical stress or repeated contact, which can include switches, connectors, relay contacts, and other components.
- Soft Gold Plating – The other form of gold electroplating is referred to as soft gold plating since the final material is comprised of nearly pure gold. This allows it to provide excellent conductivity and solderability in applications like those for microelectronics, wire bonding, semiconductor packaging, and more.
Both hard gold plating and soft gold plating have their appropriate uses, so which one will best fit your project will depend on your needs for wear resistance and electrical performance, as well as the environment your components will be operating within. Our team can help you assess your needs to determine the best path forward.
Processes and Standards
We offer several methods for our gold electroplating services, including:
- Barrel Plating – Ideal for small- to medium-sized parts that can withstand tumbling without distortion, and considered a more economical plating approach
- Rack Plating – Designed for larger, fragile, and higher reliability components, with parts being wired or hard fixtured on plating racks for submersion into the plating solution
- Vibratory Plating – Ideal for batch or bulk processing, with parts being loaded into a vibratory head with adjustable amplitude and frequency of pulse
Along with these methods for our gold plating services, we can also adhere to standards such as:
- ASTM B488*
- MIL-G-45204*
- MIL-DTL-45204*
- AMS 2422
- AMS 2425
*NADCAP Certified
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Contact Us for Industrial Gold
If you have a project that could be enhanced by gold electroplating, reach out to the team at General Metal Finishing today. We can help you assess your application needs and deliver a first-rate solution.