Vintage gold parts

[sookwinder]

Vintage gold parts
Sometime in the 2000s I bought a 1967 Fender Bass VI in sunburst and B&B. (exactly like what Lennon and Harrison played in the Get Back doco).
It didn't have the mute fitted (but I have subsequently found a vintage mute for the Bass VI) but it did come with a bridge cover.

The weird/unusual thing is that the bridge cover was gold plated. I have assumed that the original owner lost the bridge cover that came with the bass back in the day and found/located a gold plated cover replacement ... which are extremely rare anyway.

By the time I got the Bass VI the gold plating on the top surface of the cover had effectively worn away, although underneath the gold is bright as it was when it was first made. The upper surface was a strange silver/nickel/dull/oxidised colour ... but it was a cover never the less and I was happy.

Today i wanted to play the Bass VI and as I sat on the couch with the sun steaming through the window from behind me I notice two different surface finishes on the top of the cover. One, where my hand usually rests, very dull and almost sticky to the touch. The other, the lower half of the cover was a brighter dullness and didn't have any surface stickiness. The full photo below of the Bass VI shows this dull colour.

I had near by to me a polishing rag that I had just used on my car and I grabbed it and started to polish the cover. Low and behold the "sticky" area seemed to lose its dull appearance very quickly and I realised that there appeared to be a bright nickel surface underneath. The other side of the cover took an additional 15 minutes of polishing before the nickel surface became apparant. I now have a shinny nickel surfaced Bass VI bridge cover! (with gold surfacing underneath)

The only explanation for this that I can think of is that whenever Fender needed gold parts they just grabbed already nickel plated parts and sent them out to where ever they had the gold plating done.

The electro-platers must have first added an undercoat and then added the thin layer of gold plating.

[Scout]

I'm not entirely sure but there are several steps in those sort of electroplating processes and nickel is a preliminary coating step whatever the final coating is, IIRC. Maybe instead of the chrome final coat they opt for the golden final coat.

[sookwinder]

AFAIK back in the 67 and prior period Fender only used nickel and not chrome, so the normal parts for guitars back then were nickel coated. But as reports came back to fender that the nickel tarnished (which we all love now) Fender at some stage changed to chromed parts (same with Gibson)

But the notion that the gold needed a nickel coating as a base from a electro-plating perspective is interesting

[Sweetfinger]

Gold is plated over nickel and a lot of times nickel is plated over copper. The gold plating on guitar parts is quite thin and hand wear will take it down to the nickel over time. One pass of some metal polishes will take the gold off entirely.

Certain Fender parts were chromed, always chrome.

[Paolo_ray]

The only explanation for this that I can think of is that whenever Fender needed gold parts they just grabbed already nickel plated parts and sent them out to where ever they had the gold plating done.

The electro-platers must have first added an undercoat and then added the thin layer of gold plating.

Great article here with Karl Olmstead, he made a lot of the early hardware for Fender. He mentions the gold plating:

https://reverb.com/news/how-fenders-gol ... ns-archive

'A few Fenders had gold-plated metalwork. That would be done separately, presumably?

Yes, strictly a plating process. All the plating was farmed out. I didn’t do that, because we only did a limited amount of plating. My plating company only did copper or nickel plating, and hardly any copper. But the gold plating, and the chrome, too, was farmed out to other people.

He used several different companies. Platers were notoriously poor deliverers. In fact, that was the only reason I bought that plating company I had—I was having so much trouble getting delivery that we bought a little plating company of our own so we would have first crack at it.

Fender didn’t do much gold plating, it really was quite limited. Later they went through that black phase, when everything was black plated, remember? Anodized black [laughs], even the amp corners, funniest-looking things. But that’s what they wanted.'

[Highnumbers]

Yep, all part of the process.

The art of metal plating is really just the science of which metals stick to one another, when coupled with electricity and chemicals.

Copper sticks to most metal types (especially ferrous metals), which is why it's usually the first layer in the process. It also has filling properties and produces a good substrate for nickel, followed by chromium (for chrome plating) gold, or a variety of other plating finishes.

The gold by itself would not attach to the copper without a nickel layer underneath. Usually the gold layer is incredibly thin, even today, and easily rubs off leaving nickel showing. Personally I love the way that gold plating ages.

[øøøøøøø]

Fender would sometimes plate gold over chrome, in which case the gold would promptly flake off.

My 62 Jazzmaster with factory gold hardware is this way.

I’ve owned it for nearly 20 years now, and all the gold on the vibrato arm is now gone (there used to be some).

It’s chrome underneath (not nickel)