On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 23:33:17 -0000, "gareth"
wrote:

For those who make their own Morse Keys, what do you use for the contacts,
for
I have found the phosphor bronze pillar for the dot contact on my ersatz
Vibroplex
to be very noisy and scratchy?

I'm fairly sure that I asked this question before, but it has been a habit
of never put off till
tomorrow what you can put off till the day after.

I chose phosphor bronze because in the days of making one's own electronic
organs, phosphor bronze was suggested as a suitable keying matreial for the
keyboards.


Never built a morse key but in the telecomms industry, Palladium was
the way to go.

On Tue, 22 Dec 2015 08:47:19 -0000 (UTC), Brian Reay
wrote:

Rambo wrote:
On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 23:33:17 -0000, "gareth"
wrote:

For those who make their own Morse Keys, what do you use for the contacts,
for
I have found the phosphor bronze pillar for the dot contact on my ersatz
Vibroplex
to be very noisy and scratchy?

I'm fairly sure that I asked this question before, but it has been a habit
of never put off till
tomorrow what you can put off till the day after.

I chose phosphor bronze because in the days of making one's own electronic
organs, phosphor bronze was suggested as a suitable keying matreial for the
keyboards.


Never built a morse key but in the telecomms industry, Palladium was
the way to go.


Found, I believe, on the surface of disk drive disks.

The disks are generally aluminium (some are plastic, which surprised me)
and they have a thin coat of Palladium.

(It is amazing what you stumble across on YouTube, the above comes from a
video about scrapping disk drives which appeared as a suggestion when
looking for something- not about scrapping disk drives but it caught my
eye.)


http://tinyurl.com/jfvryeq

Interesting comparison of contact materials in relays. As you can see
Gold and copper are not the best options.