Great timing! That would be after silver hit an all time high of about $50/ounce, then fell back drastically. Today, you'd expect to pay no less than about $25/ounce.
Are you sure it's fine? It's not commonly used for jewelry, although not unheard of. I'd think it was sterling---92.5% silver, 7.5% copper. Great conductor, but not necessarily the best for arc resistance. Either way, you did good. There's a simple test to see if you have fine silver, if you have any doubts. A tiny drop of nitric acid and distilled water (don't use tap water----it has chlorine in it) applied to the material will dissolve a minute amount of the material and yield a clear solution that precipitates silver chloride (looks sort of like cottage cheese) when you add chlorine (table salt or HCL). If the solution remains clean, never turns blue/green, it's pure. If you slowly develop a greenish color, which turns blue after you're precipitated the silver, it's either sterling or coin silver.
Could be, but not because they can't do better. It's long been a theory about planned obsolescence. They expect you to buy replacement parts---which I can imagine is a large part of their business. Replacement parts are often priced thousands of a percent higher than their real cost. It could also be that the contacts you replace are like the ones I'll describe below, an alloy of silver and cadmium near as I could tell.
What's the advantage to the various alloys? Why don't they just use
I'm not a chemist, physicist or metallurgist, so I hesitate to reply, but for one, silver is quite soft. That's the reason it was alloyed with copper (10%) for coinage in our country. The combined elements are much tougher than either one alone------much like bronze.
Don't short change the idea that it's far more expensive than base metals, so they can stretch it nicely by alloying. That's particularly true in the case of 10K gold rings. If you understand the old marking laws, and the strategy that was used in compliance with the laws, you quickly come to understand that a 10K gold class ring, made before '75, was most likely really only 9K, which is illegal in the US. Nothing lower than 10K was considered solid gold, but tolerance in manufacturing allowed for the misleading marking, which made it legal. That is no longer true. They were allowed 1/2% for alloy variation, and 1/2% for solder, which, while gold, often is slightly lower in karat than the parent metal. Combined, they had
1% that could be substituted with base metals, a whopping 10% savings in gold when you do the math. Considering the jewelry industry used to consume gold by the ton for class rings, you can visualize the savings (or profit).For the record, I processed enough class rings to know that what I say is very true. The yield always bordered barely above 9%, and I was very thorough in my processing----very little didn't report in the end product.
I realize that my stuff is light duty, low
Pretty much. I know for fact, due to having refined them in bulk, that many of the contacts are a composite of tungsten and silver, predominantly tungsten, which you quoted, above.. It's used for arc resistance as I understand it, but then, as I said, I'm not a metallurgist.
While I never analyzed contacts for all elements (wasn't necessary*), I believe that many of the smaller ones are alloyed with cadmium. Why, I have no idea, but it wasn't uncommon to process a batch of small contacts and come up with a surprisingly low amount of silver, and nothing else that was identifiable with the processes I used. Again, when you consider the value of each element, there are definite monetary advantages to alloying.
- Knowing what was present wasn't a factor. Silver is put into solution, then extracted with copper. Anything else present of low or no value remains in solution (zinc, copper, nickel, etc.). Gold can't be in solution with silver (not in acid), and any traces of other precious metals (platinum group) are precipitated along with the silver, so there's a complete recovery of values. The only thing that otherwise goes with the silver is the miniscule amount of base metal that is dragged down mechanically-----and that is removed in the final process---along with other values-----by electrolytic refining.
Harold