Thanks for not turning the button another color:) Super cool test!

Test well done.. I am getting my "Silver" play button soon hopefully :)

%15 gold is honestly better than i was expecting

KZonlines : *We are not gonna give this man the diamond play button.*

My uncle used to run a gold plating business that ran parts for many different companies including Hewitt Packard at one point. He commented that this is an extremely common issue with gold plating since the brass will not plate properly directly to gold(nor will it have much wear resistance) it is first plated with Nickel and then plated with the composition of Gold requested by the company the Nickel is typically by far the thicker coating for various reasons and will show up in an electron microscope either if the gold is not plated on thick enough or has been worn down his thought on this was that the gold had simply been worn down slightly judging by the state of the play button and that is what is causing the nickel and zinc to show through. this does show that you would need to re plate the piece if you wanted it to last a particularly long time and both front and back are plated to help with corrosion resistance. If you want the part to be safe from oxidization you may want to re plate the parts that were cut or worn down in the front. -Best regards I love this kind of content so keep up the good work.

I’m actually very surprised. I thought those buttons were just gold and silver coloured plastic. But the fact that they’re actually metal and have gold in them is very cool.

Great job Zack and Dan!

Hi Jerry, as a machinist first then research engineer. I would say there was more gold on the surface of the gold button but that hand polishing process to bring out that mirror finish removed a lot of gold bringing it down. Congrats to you all for getting the buttons.

Little late to the game, but the play button is electroplated with nickel to act is a diffusion barrier to keep the gold on the exterior and the bronze on the inside. To add even more protection they'll sometimes add palladium as well. Without the diffusion layer, the gold, copper, and zinc would migrate and mix together.

Great video! When using SEM/EDX, try and keep an eye on the interaction volume of the electron beam with the sample. It could be picking up Ni from underneath the Au coating perhaps.

Lots of metals don't "like" to stick to each other, so plated metals typically have multiple layers. The Silver button has an aluminum core and nickel finish, but the nickel doesn't "like" aluminum, so it's got a layer of copper in between (which "sticks" to both). The Gold Play button is brass (copper & zinc, which gold doesn't "like"), so a middle layer of nickel, followed by the gold exterior. The electron microscope is identifying multiple layers of metal, hence the mixed results.

Love your videos jerry....so inspiring and motivating!!!

KZonlines : here is your Gold Button JerryRigEverything : let's start with scratch test

Wow, I think the Gold Play Button is a very nice award to signify your achievement. I am happy for all those who earn this Award. I know you work hard in making quality videos.

Nice vid! I noticed you were changing the accelerating voltages for the EDS analysis - this will indeed give you more precise percentage of gold present in the sample. I am not sure about the Oxford systems, but Bruker has sort of a self consistent model which tells you how big is the interaction volume for X-ray - does Oxford have this as well?

Wow, in 1977 I was just a kid and my class was on a field trip to a university near Olympia. One of the rooms had a Electron Microscope and that thing was HUGE. This is amazing how something like that can be shrunk down into a table top model :)

The play button is made of brass and is electroplated with ~20µm nickel to make it shiny and probably ~0,1µm gold using both a process called electrolysis, you can look that up there's plenty of information about it. Also you are right the SEM does measure a volume and not just the surface thus you detect both gold and the nickel layer below that. To find out how much gold is on there you'd have to measure its thickness with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.

It's almost certainly really 24K gold plated. The electrons and x-rays of the EDS area shooting right through the gold to additionally see the underlying Ni and Cu. EDS penetrates a few microns and Au plating is usually quite a bit thinner than that. Between the copper and gold they will plate a barrier layer of nickel to keep the Cu and Au apart as their atoms want to diffuse into one another, leading to an ugly finish. The Ni prevents the Au intermixing with the body of Cu. If you want to really verify what's on the surface, find a lab with a Auger electron spectrometer - this technique only samples the very surface and I'm certain you'll detect only 100% gold.

Who left you two alone with an electron microscope

As jerry mentioned, with EDX the x-ray penetrates the surface up to 1 ym and the resulting composition which is measured is actually the composition averaged from the surface to a deepth of 1ym. The coating thickness of 24 kt gold can reach levels of 0.1ym. If the core of the playbutton is a nickel and zink alloy (as you could assume by the shown result of the EDX-measurement), this would result in a proportion of gold of around 10%.

Theory: The front has less gold because the plaque is made and then plated, at this point the whole plaque should have the same amount of gold, but then they have to buff it and polish it to make it look glossy, rubbing off some of the gold. I Do not think simple wear and tear would account for that much of a percentage difference. A simple way to test this would be to see the gold composition of the thin stripe of glossy surface that was in the back side of the plaque, I bet it also has a lower Au content..

The top side has less hold probably because they electroplated the whole thing and polished the top off to a mirror finish. Also, the coating really doesn't have be thick for the gold to be visible. Coating a few atoms thick would also look gold like. But the x-ray could probably penetrate more than that thickness and was reading the base coating as well which was nickel. That's why it didn't show 100% gold.

If you want to get the composition of the coating of your play button maybe you should lower the electron beam voltage (I can see on your screen that you have used 20 kV) and check if the nickel contribution gets smaller. I suspect that your interaction volume of your electrons is too large and you get alot of signal from the inside of your sample or at least from a layer beneath the coating.

Zack deserves a sold 99.9 sold gold play button, all the work and missions he and his wife has done. Thank you Zack and family. ❤️❤️ 😘👍👍

Great video! This is actually the lab where I work. So here is some analysis. The beam that you were using for the front was a 20 kV beam (you can see that on the video if you pause it too). At that energy the beam will penetrate approximately 1.162 microns into the surface. For the back you used 10 kV which penetrates approximately 0.41 microns, thus the discrepancy in the concentrations could have been largely due to the difference in beam energies. Now, how gold plating works, is that you first put down a barrier metal to prevent the gold from migrating into the core material. The most common used metal is Nickel, which is exactly what you found. Now depending on the type of plating used there are going to be different thicknesses of gold plating. If they used Gold Flash or Gold Electroplate then the layer thickness would be about 0.175 microns and if they used Gold Plate then it is approximately 0.5 microns. So being that the beam only penetrated 0.41 microns on the front it is most like they used Gold Electroplate (or Gold plating and it wore off). I would expect Gold Electroplate since more recent electroplating techniques are not only cheaper but also more durable. For silver, I'm sure they didn't use silver because it tarnishes and turns black from oxidation. So in the best interest of the customer, they used a metal just as shiny that didn't need to be polished regularly.

I like how you guys didn’t go blame on them but always give credit to KZonlines:) Great video and thumbs up for you guys and KZonlines!

A nickel underplate of maybe 1.5-5 microns is used to reduce porosity of the brass surface and act as a diffusion barrier to prevent copper and zinc penetrating the top layer of gold. The actual gold plating might be as little as 3-10 angstroms thick (we're talking a few atoms here), so it makes perfect sense that the elemental makeup would return a mostly nickel result.

I want a durability test and a teardown of that electron microscope. :(

The nickel is used to enable the gold to be plated onto the brass. This is similar to the ENIG (Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold) coating found on higher-end printed circuit boards.

These guys seem like amazing dad's.

That's actually more gold than I thought.

I think the low amount of gold, and lower on the front than the back, was because of the polishing process used by whoever made it. You can see the polish on the front and how the polished bit slight wraps around to the back side.

Jerry simply rigs everything!

Now thats what we Call "Jerry Rig Everything" Literally Everything 🤣🤣

The gold thickness differs front to back due to the polishing process to make the front side shine. An amount of material must be removed to have the surface flat, hence glossier.

The difference in gold quantity between the front and back, is a lot of material is removed when it is polished.

Conclusion: there is some gold in gold button, but their is no silver in silver button. . Well done KZonlines

For some reason I wouldn't be surprised if Jerry actually owned an electron microscope

"Glass is glass, and glass breaks" *But this playbutton scratches at the level 6 with deeper grooves at the level 7*

Did you consider that the front is showing less gold than the back because they started with a plated surface(aka very very thin layer) and polished it thus removing some of the plating? It would then make sense that the unpolished back would contain more gold due to a thicker layer of plating? I think the hairless dome has been polished a few too many times as well.

i love this guy. this is such a chill channel, it could be about anything really.

So I don't know what electron gun power you're using. But EDX usually has a penetration depth of 2 microns. Nickel is a really common intermediate layer to electroplate gold so that isn't surprising. It's likely still a 24k but it's likely very thin (

I'm guessing the brass is coated in nickel and then in gold. The base metal isn't overly shiny, the nickle probably gives it a good bright shine, and then the gold on top adds the colour. Without the nickel it might be far duller looking even with the gold.

That's his dedication towards his channel and his subscribers.May god bless him for seeking new heights

First video I ever watched. Have to say, I was not disappointed. Watched about 2 years ago. Still watching to this day. Keep it up!

I think there’s less gold on the front rather than the back is because the front has been polished which makes the plating thinner.

I actually didn't think it was real gold at all, so I'm really pleasantly surprised!

Jerry, sadly, had not the gut to say that the 24K gold plated button is not gold, not even on the surface. I understand that, youtube is his employer after all. Video itself is great and I respect the guy, I wish sometimes people had a bit more balls, me included of course :(

Get this man a diamond play button! When *need* to know what it’s made of

Its not about gold brother .... Its the honor ... You must be proud of it ... !!!!

The shiny surface of the gold play button is clearly machine polished as shown by where the polish pads went slightly onto the back side during the process. This is most likely why the shiny part has a lower percentage of gold. The back side which isn't polished has a larger percentage as the micro thin layer of gold plating hasn't gone through abrasion polishing.

Technology is just so cool man, that microscope is something else

That actually makes sense as gold won't stick directly to the brass, so they plate it in nickel first then the gold will stick to the nickel. The polishing on the front probably exposed some of the nickel

Expected solid brass with maybe some gilding, so it's better than I expected.

I thought he'll do scratch test- "DEEPER GROOVES AT LEVEL 7"

the reason there is probably more gold on the back is because to get that mirror finish on the fron they need to abrade the surface by sanding and polishing. So when it was first made it most likely had an even 20% of gold around it.

How awesome is that! We used something similar in my analytical chemistry instrumentation class. I never thought I'd see those graphs again. Brings back memories Haha 🤓

i love it when different youtubers get together and make videos

Yes..... typically this type of gold plating is somewhere between 5 & 15 microns thick and deposited by an electroplating bath. In order to plate it with gold, it’s usually plated first in nickel, then in gold for better bonding results having the nickel as an intermediary substrate sandwiched between the brass and the 24K gold. The difference in material content between the front and back surfaces of the button is due to the front surface being buffed to a high polish which actually removes material in this case. The gold plate on the back is not subjected to buffing allowing the plate on the backside of the button to remain undisturbed and therefore thicker.... just my humble hypothesis, i.e. my two cents worth.... ☮️

that microscope 1000% cost more then my whole life’s worth.

Exposing KZonlines On KZonlines

It is normal that before they do gold plate the thing, they first nickel plate it (or copper plate it) - it improves the surface finish + improves bonding conditions for the gold layer. Gold layer is usually extremely thin (units of micrometers).

This electron microscope is called a SEM! Kinda like a regular microscope. but with electrons instead of light. Extra feature is that the electrons gets more reflected if the element has a larger nucleus. Also the electrons may sometimes excite electrons of the element resulting in x-rays being produced. These x-rays are unique for each element, hence u know what element it is!:D

The front likely has less gold due to being heavily buffed to create that mirror finish.

The reason the front had less gold than the back is probably because the back was not buffed, while the front was heavily buffed, rubbing off a significant portion of the gold plate.

The fact there is any gold is impressive to me.

Other KZonlinesrs when they get the Golden Play Button: thank you to all my supporters, you guys are the best etc JerryRigEverything: Is KZonlines scamming us?

It actually is pure gold on top. It's just that gold is so easy to deposit and plate thinly. So the layer is so thin that you will always also measure the nickel behind - also with a low electron energy. Best regards, Benedikt Nickel

Seriously hats off to you guys.

Watching this video before I get my gold play button in the mail that I got from eBay. I was always curious to see what it looks like in person.

it's funny to see Dan worrying about destroying things 🤭🤣😂

This guy DESERVES 10 mil

KZonlines: makes gold play button Me: is it real gold? KZonlines: yes but actually no

Well, some of those other metals other than nickel could probably be other metals from other objects like the screws or from the saws that cut it since friction can break small pieces.

Imagine if in the future phones will have this technology just embedded into the camera - a crazy thought.

I’d presume the reason you saw less gold on the front is due to them polishing it.

Ok so here's what they're doing, the zinc/copper chunk of metal is first plated in nickel and then a layer of gold over top of that. The reason nickel goes on first is the layer of gold sticks to the metal better when there is a nickel base layer. Both of these layers are only going to be a few hundred microns thick. At my work we work with aluminum boxes that are gold plated in in this exact manner.

How crazy is it that 1 or 2 years later they actually visit the place where all of the play buttons are made. ( What’s Inside ).

I’m actually really impressed there was any gold at all

Foundry worker/machinist/engineer here, zinc is also a heck of a lot simpler to cast in mass quantities compared to nickle alloys. Casting process is far simpler, mold is cheaper and will last way longer and so on. I think that the cost reduction is even more in manufacturing costs than in material cost.

You can't have expected it to be 100% gold, that would cost millions

I'm more impressed that you have an e- microscope, more than the gold button

Don't know for sure but could it be that the difference in thickness of the gold from the front to back is because some gold is buffed off during the polishing process? In other words, entire piece is gold plated first, then the front is buffed and polished.

All you had to do was change the acceleration voltage of the electron gun to a lower voltage such as 5kV . Redo the EDS analysis. if the gold content increased that would be due to the beam not penetrating as much and showing a bias for the surface material. There is actual programs for using such differential analysis for the coating thickness measurements.

Zack, you'd better do a bend test when you get the gold play button!

I work in a plant that plates parts with nickel, gold, silver, tin, or palladium that go into car rear view cameras, radio towers, etc. The part usually starts with a copper/ bronze/ brass base. Each part is connected to a rail that makes it easier to plate the parts through the line all at once. For the final product, the rail is discarded. First, the part comes off of cardboard reels that need spliced together to keep the line going. Next, it goes through an electroclean bath, then diluted sulfuric acid to clean the part. Then, it goes through 4 cells of nickel. Afterwards, it goes through a gold wheel. Then, it can get silver, tin, whatever the requirements are for a specific part.

Hmm, Nickel-Brass is often what's used for "gold" coins (as it's both much cheaper, and a _lot_ more hardwearing), so their bothering to plate it with the real thing at all is more than they probably really needed to do. It might show more on the back than the front because the plating is probably very thin, as well as soft, and it might have got more wear on the front than the back if it was transported with the backing plate in place... Similarly, US Nickels got their name because that's what's used for "silver" coins... true, old timey silver coins tarnish like crazy (including if just plated), so you probably don't want that for your commemorative buttons. And in the past, before copper started getting stupidly expensive, it was just a plating layer over a copper core (which is, of course, highly conductive, and so very good for electroplating)... dunno why they'd have a very mild copper/mostly nickel alloy in the middle though... Maybe it's easier to mould, and then the pure layer is plated on top to give it the proper shine?

The reason there's more gold on the back is because the front is polished after plating. Felt like that was obvious but didn't see anyone point it out.

The humour from Zack is subtle but it's hilarious like when he listed Australia upside down.

youtube actually gives every youtuber with 100k subscribers a "NICKEL" Play Button...damn

This gold play button has travelled more countries than an Instagram vlogger

That's way more gold than I thought there'd be.

Congratulations you deserve it and you earned it keep the amazing job and amazing videos 😎🎊🎉🎂🍦🍰

It makes sense that the back has more gold , the shine is from polishing it , this removes layers from the surface

I thought he was going to cut open his OWN gold play button. If he did I wouldn't have been surprised, it probably would have also scratched at a level 6 with deeper grooves at a level 7.

In spectrograph analysis it depens how big voltage he used for the beam. Higher voltage - deper analysis. So if the gold layer is very thin, it will be better try lower voltage :-) I was working in Thermofisher scientific which is making this microscopes :-)

They would not want brass to oxidize, so gold plating is a good idea. I work with a lot of brass, and they age (gracefully) but won't be gold too long.

I love ❤ the channel! It's good to see what's inside?

When something is plated it is usually done by electroplating in a bath which is why the play button would have gold on the front and back. A plating bath as opposed to vacuum deposition which would only plate one surface. The reason there is less gold on the front of the Gold Play Button, is that after plating it, it was polished which removes a fair amount of the metal in order to achieve the polish. Having it in your back pack or pockets wouldn't remove nearly as much as the polishing process. Although plating deposits such a small amount of metal that it will wear off fairly quickly. The reason the Silver Play Button isn't make with silver (either sterling or fine silver which is considered pure) is that it would oxidize and wouldn't look nice after a while.

my respects For sacrificing your Golden play for humanity