It looked like spray paint or something of the like but I wasn't sure.You will never get that home-made edge spot ink out.
You will never get that home-made edge spot ink out.
Home-made, you say?
Nice chip! Looks pretty old, probably from the 40's or early 50s. A lot of the older small keys with alpha or initial hot stamps were used in underground or illegal clubs and are very difficult to identify without distributor records. As an FYI BC Wills chips were made by Burt & Co, which then became ASM, then CPC. BC Wills, probably did the hot stamping though. As far as the inserts, it looks like ink or paint, but hard to really tell without seeing it in person. The earlier clay insert chips, the inserts were not exactly "sharp" or uniform. Here are a few examples that i have in my collection. Good luck!
You can find the USPC records on the ChipGuide, which is the most amazing resource for us chip hounds!Wow, great info, Jeff! I'm curious about your sources - this kind of stuff is hard to find on the internet these days; I'm guessing a lot of that knowledge got lost (except in the minds of the members) when Chiptalk died.
Wow, great info, Jeff! I'm curious about your sources - this kind of stuff is hard to find on the internet these days; I'm guessing a lot of that knowledge got lost (except in the minds of the members) when Chiptalk died.
Howard Herz wrote an excellent history on the B. C. Wills company, which has some excellent information about the history of the Small Key and Large Key molds which they owned until the late 1980s. He tracked down the last owners of the company in the early1990s, apparently only a couple years or so after they had destroyed the record cards for their chips sales during the last 50 years. The article can be found here; http://ccgtcc-ccn.com/wills.pdf
Sheesh. Please don't post stuff like this at 9 PM... spent hours last night looking at that unbelievable archive when I should have been sleeping.You can find the USPC records on the ChipGuide, which is the most amazing resource for us chip hounds!
http://chipguide.themogh.org/cg_uspc_list.php