Casablanca $5’s arrived in the mail. SMOKIN! (1 Viewer)

[CrazyEddie]

It'd be quite a decision to mill a master die. Once that's modified, no more cups could ever be made again on the old pattern.

Perhaps the die was damaged, and so they milled it out (and maybe retextured the surface?) in order to remove the damaged spot without having to trash the entire die, resulting in essentially a new mold (and no more cups for the old mold).

Total guesswork, of course.

 

[RainmanTrail]

It'd be quite a decision to mill a master die. Once that's modified, no more cups could ever be made again on the old pattern.

Perhaps the die was damaged, and so they milled it out (and maybe retextured the surface?) in order to remove the damaged spot without having to trash the entire die, resulting in essentially a new mold (and no more cups for the old mold).

Total guesswork, of course.

It wouldn't have been "milled" though, as it would require material to be added to the die, not removed from it in order to produce these chips.

 

[cpiaaq]

It wouldn't have been "milled" though, as it would require material to be added to the die, not removed from it in order to produce these chips.

You don't understand. The die makes the cups, which make the chips. @CrazyEddie explains it better in the post I linked above.

 

[RainmanTrail]

You don't understand. The die makes the cups, which make the chips. @CrazyEddie explains it better in the post I linked above.

Ah, so the inverse. Interesting. Maybe they did then?

 

[cpiaaq]

It's my working theory at this point. I'd like to look closer at my LCVs to see if I can find evidence of the same master die being used. No time now, but maybe next week.

 

[ovo]

I always figured the chips were secured with damaged labels, so the idea was to mill and replace, and why not align the labels while we are at it

 

[CrazyEddie]

I always figured the chips were secured with damaged labels, so the idea was to mill and replace, and why not align the labels while we are at it

I don't think you can rework a chip. Once it's pressed, the plastic/clay compound becomes cured under the heat and pressure (i.e. thermosetting) and can't be made malleable again. So even if they milled out the previous inlays and reshaped the chip, they couldn't press a new inlay into the chip's surface. At most they could glue a decal to it, but that doesn't seem to be what they did.

 

[Nanook]

These oddities (and others) have always intrigued me, until this thread I hadn't put it all together. The chips weren't milled, the master die was.

The master die (positive) was milled and then new cups (negative) were made from it. This is similar to the Ceasars Palace, LV mold where the recess goes right up to the edge of the columns now. There are worse examples (other casinos) where the recess goes into the letters of the house mold. I suspect 2 reasons for this. 1) its expensive to produce a new master die, so the old one is modified. and 2) The person doing the milling is "just following instructions" and the design has been ignored.

Pic of a master die and cups borrowed from @CrazyEddie's post here
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Thinking about this a bit...
I used to work in a machine shop as an engineer so I am pretty familiar with how all this stuff works. We had lots of CNC lathes and mills and the precision that is possible with modern cnc machining is pretty amazing. With the right equipment and a skilled programmer/operator just about anything can be done.

I am thinking that the master die was used in days gone by because that way the cups could be replicated more accurately. When they were making chips back in the day before cnc was a thing everything was done by hand and accurately duplicating one cup to the next may not have been possible. With the accuracy of modern cnc mills I can't help but wonder if the master die idea is a thing of the past? If I was given the job of making the cups, with my current knowledge, I would just use a cnc mill and call it a day. All tolerances could easily be held to somewhere in the .001-.005" range and there would be virtually no way anyone could tell a chip made from one cup to the next.

Maybe there is another reason I am not thinking of, idk...

 

[CrazyEddie]

Bear in mind that mold cups get used in a batch of around forty at a time inside the press. The press makes twenty chips at once, and uses two cups to make one chip. So even today it might be cheaper to machine a single master die and use the die to stamp forty cups than to machine forty cups. I'm not a machinist so I can't really say, but it seems plausible. (Also I could be off on how many chips get pressed at once - it might be a dozen, it might be two dozen, but it's something in that range, more or less, give or take.)

Injection molds are a different kind of thing. Instead of having mold cups that get swapped out, there's just one big mold, and it's complicated - it has multiple layers, interior channels, and moving parts. So the entire mold gets machined; there's no master die and no stamped-out mold cups.

Someone could engineer a new compression molding press that doesn't need mold cups or master dies... but nobody's had a big incentive to do that. Everyone who's made compression-molded chips in the last century is basically using the exact same equipment that's been in use for the last century. Although apparently Paulson/GPI has retooled their production line to some degree in order to increase automation and decrease labor, but a) that was fairly recently, and b) we're not privy to the details.

 

[Nanook]

Bear in mind that mold cups get used in a batch of around forty at a time inside the press. The press makes twenty chips at once, and uses two cups to make one chip. So even today it might be cheaper to machine a single master die and use the die to stamp forty cups than to machine forty cups. I'm not a machinist so I can't really say, but it seems plausible. (Also I could be off on how many chips get pressed at once - it might be a dozen, it might be two dozen, but it's something in that range, more or less, give or take.)

Injection molds are a different kind of thing. Instead of having mold cups that get swapped out, there's just one big mold, and it's complicated - it has multiple layers, interior channels, and moving parts. So the entire mold gets machined; there's no master die and no stamped-out mold cups.

Someone could engineer a new compression molding press that doesn't need mold cups or master dies... but nobody's had a big incentive to do that. Everyone who's made compression-molded chips in the last century is basically using the exact same equipment that's been in use for the last century. Although apparently Paulson/GPI has retooled their production line to some degree in order to increase automation and decrease labor, but a) that was fairly recently, and b) we're not privy to the details.

I was aware of everything you said and 100% agree with everything

 

[RivieraDanny]

Yes, they are beautiful!


View attachment 697025

Hey. Why do you have my ones???? Send those back!!

 

[pltrgyst]

Hey. Why do you have my ones???? Send those back!!

Well, if you're the guy who just paid $30 for one of them on eBay, I'd be happy to. I take paypal...

 

[RainmanTrail]

Well, if you're the guy who just paid $30 for one of them on eBay, I'd be happy to. I take paypal...

 

[Ben8257]

Travis you been saving that one for a while haven't you? I damn near died laughing! Larry I have to say you definitely stand to make a healthy profit when it's time to sell that one and no I don't consider that flipping. Those $1s are definitely hard to come by and in very high demand! I know a Particular pizza making genius that would be very much involved if those ever went to auction! Haha