I was taking apart my old living room stereo which doesn’t work anymore. I found several RCA cables with gold-plated ends. I know that RCA cables are slowly being phased out, and aren’t worth a whole lot. How much gold is in each cable? Would it be worth it to dismantle these?
Micrograms.
Unless you have a warehouse full of them, the gold isn’t worth the time. Actually, the copper is much more valuable.
Also, it’s gold plated (as you said) so you wouldn’t dismantle them, you’d have to melt the gold off. If it were worth anything at all you’d see all the corner jewelry stores asking for gold plated electronics stuff.
The plating on most connectors is vanishingly thin - sometimes a few hundred atoms thick. Gold’s marvelous properties allow it to give all the anti-corrosion benefit in a crazy-sheer layer that’s easy to apply.
There is an industry that grinds up literally tons of discarded electronics to recover the valuable metals. IIRC, gold is one of the least profitable results. Copper, cadmium, and some other rare metals add up to greater totals.
(In Japan, the industry feeds, or for a time fed, on not just cell phones but unsold ones - the Japanese update phones so often that warehouses of last-week’s models have no market. So they get ground up and recycled.)
And if it’s not already obvious, it is only the connectors that are gold-plated. The wire in the cable is not plated with gold.
And as others have mentioned, there’s so little gold there that it’s not worth it to try and salvage it.
A factoid I heard (no cite) is that gold can be drawn so thin that an ounce of it could be made into a wire that would stretch from New York to Chicago.
So, there really isn’t much gold in a plated cable end.
I think the term metallurgists like to use is “malleable.” As in, “Gold is a very malleable metal.”
You know what would be interesting?
Take an old plane. Beat up, notoriously hard to fly. Then, replace all the copper wiring with gold.
It’d be a great way to hide my assets from the soon-to-be-ex, amirite?
Actually, malleable refers to hammering into a sheet – which gold is also impressively good at. The word for ability to be drawn into a wire is “ductile.”
This may not end well. Gold has only 77% of the conductivity of copper.
The extra voltage drops in the cabling may be OK, but I suspect your main generators will overheat and burn out.
This Flight of Capital may be a short one.
I suspect there isn’t enough copper in a plane to make a difference, but gold is also more than twice as heavy as copper.
This was a plot point from the first Travis McGee novel, more or less.
Yea, an aircraft manufacturer would never use solid gold wire in an aircraft, even if it were free. The “weight resistivity” (a.k.a. “resistivity-density product”) of gold is 427 nΩ·m·g/cm[sup]3[/sup]. The weight resistivity of copper is 150 nΩ·m·g/cm[sup]3[/sup]. Which means, for the same resistance and distance, a solid gold wire would weigh 185% more than a solid copper wire.
(For the same resistance and distance, a solid aluminum wire weighs 52% less than a solid copper wire. This is why it’s used for overhead power lines, and in some aircraft applications.)
So contrary to popular opinion, gold is not a better conductor than copper. Not only does gold have a higher resistivity value compared to copper, but it has much higher weight resistivity compared to copper.
Of course, gold does have some an advantages over copper in electrical applications: 1) It doesn’t readily tarnish or oxidize. This makes it an ideal plating material for connectors and dry electrical contacts. And gold wire is used in some high-temperature sensors. 2) It is very ductile (thanks Baffle). Which means a solid gold wire might be better than a solid copper wire when you need an extremely small diameter.
Which is why gold is often used for the bond wires in Integrated Circuit packages. There’s gold in them thar LED Christmas lights!
I was idly running some numbers in my head while installing downspouts and listening to my MP3 player today, and I think I can estimate maybe an order of magnitude within the weight of the gold by considering the total value and not how big or long the wires are.
Carolyn said she had enough to pay Martin a first officer’s salary but not enough to pay Herc a senior captain’s salary. I think she would have used a lot of the gold to pay off or pay down her 3 mortgages. I believe Douglas once referred to her house as a mansion, so say that’s in the 1 million to 10 million dollar range (and I’m thinking in dollars, adjust appropriately for pounds).
Maybe there’s a bit of a nest egg now too-- enough to run OJS Air at around the break-even point? It hasn’t been profitable in the past, in fact, that would be an improvement.
So, say, double that to 2 to 20 million dollars worth total? I think gold ends up in the range of about 50 to 100 pounds of weight per million dollars, so Gerti had extra weight of 100 to 2000 pounds on her, on every flight. If it was a full flight of 16 passengers (I’m estimating 250 pounds per person including luggage, so 4000 pounds of self-loading cargo when full) the gold added something like 2.5% to 50% more weight.
That’s significant, I think, and Martin may be a much better pilot than he was led to believe. I like to think that once he gets off the simulators at his new airline, and flies a new 737, he finds out he’s really become quite good.
In Goldfinger, the panels of the car were made from gold.