Gold Plating Problems with Jewelry, How to make gold plating last longer? PVD?

A. Hi Sarah. This subject has been beat to death on this thread and a dozen like it, so every answer you seek is on this site if you have the patience. Gold can easily be plated from a barely visible thickness of 1/6 micron or so to 100X that. Very heavy hard gold plating can be a final finish that can last for years, but most gold plating is much thinner and requires clear-coating to survive any time at all. Gold colored titanium nitride in lieu of some or all of the gold is another potential solution.

Gold is expensive and most of the world has been working desperately to use almost none of it. Just a few years ago, one micron of gold was the standard for costume jewelry; now the biggest issue seems to be simply finding a shop willing to reliably do plating of a quarter that thickness. If the shops you are working with don't know and don't care what thickness of gold they are applying, obviously it is junk. Just above your entry is one from Indonesia where the writer still applies over 3 microns of hard gold, so such suppliers still exist.

Regards,

A. Hi Ric. Sorry for your medical misfortunes and the ill treatment you received from a cruise line, but our limited time and bandwidth forces us to focus on the metal finishing side of things and not get drawn into posting comments and retorts and clarifications and rebuttals and second opinions about cruise line complaints, etc.

You could gold plate this brass handle, but gold plating solutions are expensive, about $400 for a quart, and you would still need a plating rectifier and some expertise.

I would suggest trying several (4 or 5) very light coats of brass lacquer instead.

Regards,

A. Hi. That's not how gold plating is done. It's done with electricity in a water-based solution usually containing potassium gold cyanide. It's not trivial to the point where it can be done with surplus gold coins.

The melting point of gold is higher than the melting point of brass, which is one reason you can't do it via hot dipping.

Yes, you probably could cast a replacement out of solid gold by melting a few hundred coins as you propose. But weigh your brass handle, multiply by 2-1/4 because gold is about 2-1/4 times as heavy as brass, and multiply by the value of gold, about $1300 per Troy ounce for the value of that brass walking stick handle. Depending on the exact design, it sounds like about $25,000. If you have that many gold coins, I think you'd be better off buying a gold plated replacement, which would cost about 1% to 3% of that.

Regards,

A. Hi Far. "Nobody" anywhere is doing 50 micron (µm) gold plating (which would be 200 ^² mils). Jewelry made of 316L with 50 µm of gold cladding would be beyond fantastic quality and would last essentially forever. But as mentioned earlier, sales blurbs are not meant to technically inform you, and you could easily be misreading something :-(

2.5 microns of gold over sterling silver can be called "vermeil" and is very good quality jewelry but 2.5 µm does not compare to 50 µm :-)

Regards,

A. Hi again. It would probably be difficult or impossible for a trained jeweler to compare such stuff from sales blurbs, and nobody can say which items are real vs. counterfeit. But that's the thing with jewelry, you buy it for what you perceive as beauty, you don't buy it to make money as a precious metals speculator. You could see if Consumer Reports or your better business bureau or your state's consumer protection agency has any bad reports on companies, but you can't get brand recommendations from a "no registration required" anonymous public forum because salespeople just pose as satisfied customers :-)

We can continue to explain what terms like vermeil mean, but that's about it. I am rather surprised that vermeil would have an anti-tarnish coating on it, as I thought it was thick enough and corrosion resistant enough to have no need for it. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi again. Sorry, but we cannot post your request for people to tell you which of the three brands/sellers is "better", for the reasons we mentioned. For my personal taste vermeil is "better" than gold filled.
But #1 said nothing about vermeil, it just says "color: yellow" -- it could contain no gold at all with that description.
#2 said 14K gold, but no indication of thickness at all -- it may contain only 10 cents worth of gold, or not even (no way to tell) since the thickness is not mentioned. #3 says "18K gold layer", but again no indication at all of thickness. I personally don't know what that means, if anything.

I've tried to tell you why people can't do what you want, i.e., tell you which chain is "better" based on a sales blurb -- from resellers offering jewelry with no brand names, no less; it's a fool's errand. Please go by seller's reputation or a recommendation from a friend who has one. No matter how you value your time, you've already spent the $10.99 cost of the cheapest of the three :-)

Regards,

PVD gold coatings are not gold. They are a hard nitride, basically tool coatings. If deposited properly, PVD coatings are extremely hard and durable. For this reason, several industries have gone away from gold plating to PVD, including faucetry and door hardware.

A. Hi Tessa. If you're making important money, you should consider retaining a plating consultant. It is difficult to make real suggestions when we don't know what you are ordering or what you are getting or what the price sensitivity is.

But it is most certainly possible to get gold plating that is thick enough or that has a capable enough clearcoat or which is backed up with titanium nitride (TiN) coloring to easily solve the return problem and last many years.

There probably are capable jewelry plating shops in Amsterdam or within easy travel distance which can deliver super quality; if that's not an affordable approach, they can offer you the knowledge to specify a process so you can have the jewelry plated properly in China. A problem which we talk about frequently here is that, while Chinese manufacturers can do a great job for companies like Apple, when you are in the position of just "throwing it over the wall" and hoping for the best, rather than controlling the manufacturing process, it's very difficult to get quality work.

You can probably afford and specify significantly thicker gold plating, which would last on its own, but which is expensive. Or you can apply a good protective clearcoat so it is the clearcoat rather than the gold which resists wear. If the volume is high, you can probably afford to have TiN applied by a PVD process before the gold plating. TiN is gold colored (you can see it on drills in a home improvement store) and is very hard and long-wearing, and inexpensive. The idea is for you to do TiN plus gold plating, and then the jewelry will remain gold colored even if the plating wears.

If you can offer more info, we can probably offer more help. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi Tessa. We frequently see jewelry items that are gold plated in Asia that our customers ask us to measure the gold thickness. It's usually 0.02 to 0.05 microns of gold thickness which is very thin and will not withstand much wear. I'd recommend that you ask for 1 to 3 microns thickness and verify.

A. Hi Tessa. I think Neil is on the right track that you simply need significantly thicker gold plating for your high end jewelry, but TiN is certainly not poisonous or harmful. It is applied as a substitute for gold in some applications like bathroom faucets, and in combination with gold plating on high end watches. The problem is probably that the vendor can't offer it.

The thing about TiN is that it is relatively inexpensive when applied in volume because Ti is not a precious metal like gold is. But TiN cannot be electroplated; it must be deposited from a $1M+ Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) chamber, so it's not suited to low volume items or to small, low capital, plating shops.

Regards,

A. Hi Sicco. A problem in understanding this stuff is that gold is a precious metal but it is also a color ... and people are sometimes not careful in explaining which one they are speaking of. Further, their main interest is sometimes to induce you to buy by keeping you confused, rather than to technically inform you.

Ion Plating

Titanium Nitride is gold in color, but it is not gold. Gold metal does not "stick better" or "wear better" when applied by PVD than by electroplating, but gold colored titanium nitride (which cannot be electroplated, but must be applied by PVD) wears much better than real gold metal. To add further confusion, although Titanium nitride is approximately the color of gold, it is possible to get the color of the article even more realistic by applying a thin coating of real gold on top of it. So your vendor is telling you that they are applying 0.035 microns of real gold, but there is gold colored titanium nitride underneath it, sufficient to last a reasonable time. If your item contains well under 1¢ worth of gold it's probably a bit silly to worry what karat it is :-)

Regards,

A. Hi again Sicco. This is getting repetitive, but it is possible to electroplate a layer of gold that is thick enough that it can last a very long time without any IP plating, PVD process, clearcoats or anything -- just the gold plating. See the earlier answers for a discussion of these thicknesses. But most people consider it economically prohibitive to apply that much gold these days, so they either put a TiN (gold colored) deposit under the gold or in place of the gold, or they put a clearcoat on top of the gold plating so it wears away slower. It's not that you can't deposit 0.035 µm of gold except on TiN, it's that this coating is so very thin that you probably won't get a good saturated gold color in the first place, and it would wear away in a day or so anyway.

A clearcoat on straight TiN without any real gold present probably wouldn't make much sense because the TiN is more wear resistant than the clear coat. But if you have TiN followed by an extremely thin layer of actual gold, I imagine some people would clearcoat it to retain the best gold color longer.

Yes, gold karats refer to the purity, 24k being 100% pure, 12K being 50% pure, etc; whereas diamond carats refer to the size or weight.

Regards,