yeah, i read his link but I swear, you can gold plate a cover with real gold. Before I got into doing it, I was actually bothering a lot of blacksmiths, goldsmiths, jewellers, and gold platers- even librarians and luthiers just making sure i've done a lot of research, just as I am bothering everyone right now about the korg ax1500g and the whole stuff about getting the best single coil sound out from paf humbuckers and I found out that you can put real gold in your covers! I think lordathestrings is only aware of the normal way they do gold plating- which is just actually brass. I'm talking about something in the lines of jewellry gold plating and those gold platings that they do on those metal industries where they use real gold. There's many ways that you can do gold plating. One is adding brass to the process to make it more resistant to wear. trust me, this info is crap. it can be done!