When is a card with fingers a finger card?

When talking about fingerboards, there are a few things you have to consider.

First, there are three types of plating, type 1, 2 and 3

Type 1 is 99.7% gold

Type 2 is 99.0% gold

Type 3 is 99.9% gold

All expressed as minimum

Then there are different hardness grades, a, b, c and d but I won't get into that as it doesn't matter for this explanation.



Then there are 5 different classes

Class 00 is 20 micro inches

Class 0 is 30 micro inches

Class 1 is 50 micro inches

Class 2 is 100 micro inches

Class 3 is 200 micro inches

So you have percentage of the gold plate in actual gold, the hardness (Which doesn't matter for this) and the thickness.

Telecom, Military, RF Shielding and a few other types are usually Class 3

Most people do not consider the other things that determine value, Class 3 is great, but if it only covers 30% of the fingerboard, then the lower thickness might actually have more if it covers 80% of the board. Here are examples of what I am talking about.

If you look at this board, you will notice there is very little space between the gold plated fingers:



Here is another picture I took not long back of the same example:



Here is a picture of another slot card that is almost solid gold plate on the fingerboard:



These are generally class 1

Here is an example of Class three gold plating, this is Al with Class 3 RF Shielding gold plating



Notice how buttery it looks

Here is an example of hospital equipment finger boards, you can see the dull gold color, this would be Class 3 gold plating, but only over about 50-60% of the fingerboard.



Here is a mix of fingerboards, some close cut, some not, some with wide spaces between the gold fingers, so some of these fingerboards only cover about 30% of the board.



So, what determines the value of fingerboards, is the thickness of the gold plating, how close the gold fingers are together, and the percentage of gold in the gold plating. This is why different fingerboards will bring different prices. The values vary greatly.

I have run fingerboards and barely recovered a gram per lb, and others I have recovered almost over 4+ grams per lb. The values vary a lot, thus the prices paid vary greatly. Because it takes so much effort to sort them properly, and to pay accordingly, scrap yards have their own way of classifying the fingerboards as to allow for a large enough buffer in case the fingerboards have far less than suspected.

Scott