As promised, quick explanation of what we can and can't do so far.
Going in order of my pics.
Small Crown - 7/8 inch, shaped and 1 inch no problem. 1-1/16 - this is only one of two chips where the inlays survived out of all the samples I made. They fell off due to lack of suction due to the shape of the mold. Shame as they look ok otherwise. Hotstamp - incredibly heavy strike required to just about produce an acceptable result but the 'flashing' from the foil sticks out way above the chip surface so no good. However, occurred to me last week while the final color samples were being made that these blanks used to test the hotstamp were amongst the very first chips to come out of the press. The samples got progressively better the more we played around with the mold so I thought it would be worth a second shot. A few more blanks were run off right at the end and they will be tested when we have time with the lighthouse one side and a larger (probably Atlantic Club) on the back to see how those go. Will report back on that.
Large Crown - 7/8 inch and shaped no problem. The 1 inch inlay is distorted because the ring is so deep. I know sometimes our existing chips with larger inlays do this but this is one of the best examples I could get. Not acceptable. 1-1/16 actually touches the crowns and gets completely screwed up. The inlays fell off half of these also. Hotstamp (sorry, gold would have scanned better than silver) look acceptable using same pressure etc. as our other molds.
Going in order of my pics.
Small Crown - 7/8 inch, shaped and 1 inch no problem. 1-1/16 - this is only one of two chips where the inlays survived out of all the samples I made. They fell off due to lack of suction due to the shape of the mold. Shame as they look ok otherwise. Hotstamp - incredibly heavy strike required to just about produce an acceptable result but the 'flashing' from the foil sticks out way above the chip surface so no good. However, occurred to me last week while the final color samples were being made that these blanks used to test the hotstamp were amongst the very first chips to come out of the press. The samples got progressively better the more we played around with the mold so I thought it would be worth a second shot. A few more blanks were run off right at the end and they will be tested when we have time with the lighthouse one side and a larger (probably Atlantic Club) on the back to see how those go. Will report back on that.
Large Crown - 7/8 inch and shaped no problem. The 1 inch inlay is distorted because the ring is so deep. I know sometimes our existing chips with larger inlays do this but this is one of the best examples I could get. Not acceptable. 1-1/16 actually touches the crowns and gets completely screwed up. The inlays fell off half of these also. Hotstamp (sorry, gold would have scanned better than silver) look acceptable using same pressure etc. as our other molds.