[volt-nuts] Banana jack shorting straps

[Mark Sims]

The main use of these would be shorting sense to drive jacks.  They could also be used for input shorts.  The advantage over bare copper would be the ENIG gold finish... bare copper quickly forms oxide layers and copper oxide has a horrible thermal EMF.  Granted, ENIG gold basically involves waving a bar of gold over the plating tank and hoping some gold atoms fall off.  The board house I use deposits a thicker layer than most.   You don't want to know what "hard gold" finish would cost.

Using a PCB house to fab them is probably 20 times less expensive than having a machine shop do them out of solid copper... maybe 50 times less if you need to get them gold plated.