Full of...questions...identifying finish

[JimGo]

I finally bought some drawers to help keep my kits organized and in one place. I'm what some call a "type A" personality, so I had to sort them, and take an inventory. In so doing, I looked at the Jr. Gent's I have, and some have a deeper gold color than others. The labels aren't on the kits any more, so I can't remember which ones are the Ti Gold and which ones are the 10K. Anybody know which ones are which?

 

[Rudy Vey]

Originally posted by JimGo
<br />I finally bought some drawers to help keep my kits organized and in one place. I'm what some call a "type A" personality, so I had to sort them, and take an inventory. In so doing, I looked at the Jr. Gent's I have, and some have a deeper gold color than others. The labels aren't on the kits any more, so I can't remember which ones are the Ti Gold and which ones are the 10K. Anybody know which ones are which?

CSUSA's Titaniumgold on the Gents Jr has a more like brass looking gold tone. Use some other kits from that you know they are gold to compare.
Baron's from Berea are coated with a normal thin gold coating over the Titaniumgold, so they look more like gold.

 

[JimGo]

Thanks Rudy, that's what I thought. I had purchased a bunch of Jr. Gent 10K's a (relatively) long time ago, but also remembered purchasing some Ti Gold, and couldn't remember which I had purchased more of. As you put it, the kits I had fewer of had a lighter, brass color to them where the other kits had a golder color.

I was going to compare the kits against other, known-gold kits, but was afraid there might be some color variation from one kit to another, and didn't want to compare Baron kits to the Jr. Gent (or Sierra's to the Jr. Gent) because I was afraid the manufacturers used different plating techniques (as you described).

 

[RussFairfield]

Jim,
Your's is a problem that everyone who uses different platings has to face at some time. That is why I use only 24k for SlimLine kits and Ti-Gold for everything else, and hope that the labels on the bags are always correct.

It looks like you have several options.

You can sort them by color and brightness, but this doesn't work very well because there is enough variation in platings of the same kind, their age, and their appearance on the different parts to make this nothing more than a guess at best.

You can use all of the parts to assemble pens, and the difference will be obvious after they have been used for a couple months. I discovered this method when I got some bags of parts that had been mislabeled. Fortunately, most people lose the pen before they have a chance to know the difference.

A faster way to tell the difference is to buff the finish after the pen is assembled, and replace those parts whose plating came off. I tried this after the mislabeled parts got mixed in with the others.

You can throw them all away and start over. The only positive solution (unless the new parts are mislabeled).

Or, you can call whoever made the parts and ask them. I tried this, and discovered that they don't know either.