MD-55 Dots Mold (1 Viewer)

BamaT8ter

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Just picked up a bunch of these cheap. Anyone have any information on them beyond what’s on Eisenstadt’s page? Apparently they’re at least 75 years old.
 
I don’t have them in my hands yet, so pr0n is limited:
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Hmm. Eisenstadt’s site suggests the mold went out of production in 1946. It’s pretty clear it continued for at least a while after that.
 
Just picked up a bunch of these cheap. Anyone have any information on them beyond what’s on Eisenstadt’s page? Apparently they’re at least 75 years old.

The Dots mold is one of the very first mold designs created. It's been speculated that it may have been a very early open mold, as several companies seemed to have used it during the 1930s and 1940s.

As Eisenstadt points out, White's Club Room Equipment (Cincinnati, Ohio) had sample chips on the mold. Gene Trimble reported that he was also able to trace some Dots mold chips back to the Jack Todd Co. (Kansas City, MO), and the Evans Co. (Chicago, IL). I don't know exactly how he did that.
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(Photos courtesy of the ChipGuide)

Some hot stamped Dots mold chips have a very very tiny "S" impressed in the rim. This was probably done by one of the distributors (likely the Salt Lake Card Co. in Utah) to further protect the hot stamp chips that they sold on this open mold. As otherwise, someone could buy the chips on the mold from another distributor, duplicate the hot stamp, and produce "ringers".

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(Photo from Gene Trimble, http://www.thechipboard.com/archive...id/1263673/sbj/illegal-of-the-day-colorado-2/)

All of these 1930s and 1940s chips were made by the USPC Co. The USPC Co. transfers their machinery and the dot mold cups to the Burt Co. around 1946/1947, and the Dots mold largely disappears from use. The Burt company preferred to use the "Diamond Square" mold as their main open mold.

As @CrazyEddie points out, there is a Burt chip order on the Dots mold in 1972. It is the only recorded Burt Co. use of this mold. I believe that this may have been a one off experiment. From 1969 to 1971, the Caro Co. (Paris, France) had a couple of orders on the open "Diamond Square" mold, then they use the "Dots" mold for one order in 1972, and then beginning in 1972 into the early 1980s they have around two dozen inlaid chip orders on the "Diamond Square Square" mold. During that time I think they may have owned the "DiaSquSqu" mold, or licensed it from Burt, as no one else is using it. There may have been something about the Dots mold, perhaps being too worn out, that led the Burt Co. (or Caro?) to not want to use it.
 
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