Nexgen80 Injection molded? (1 Viewer)

[diablo2112]

I've been sampling a number of sets loosely called "China Clays" the last few weeks as part of my initial acquisitions. I purchased a nice set of Nexgen80s off the classifieds here, and IMHO, they're nicest of the "China Clays" I've handled. They shuffle nicely, are consistently 10.0g per chip, and feel a bit chalky and sound good. Overall, a decent chip for a starter set. I know they have a reputation for durability issues. They seem ok so far, and my shuffle stacks are holding up well to hundreds of ripples. A few other posts archived here make claims of good durability for Nexgen80 chips if you do a bit of searching.

Now for the interesting part. I've been reading on injection molding vs. compression. Everyone says China clays are injection molded. Indeed, the Card Mold NCC (New China Club) chips I recieved are clearly injection molded. Grinding down a chip (see below) shows that the colors are surface-imprinted. So far, so good. The Nexgen 80s show a very different construction. For starters, the spots are a different color, completely through the chip. In addition, on close inspection, the spots are not identical chip to chip. There's small variations in the shape of each. This is best seen in my gemological miscroscope, but each chip is definitely different. I was under the impression that such features are characteristic of compression molded chips, not injection. Am I wrong? Thoughts on this?

Here's a few pics to illustrate. Thanks.

 

[TheOffalo]

Ceramics are printed on the surface. China Clays have the colors all the way through even though they are injection molded, is my understanding.

 

[diablo2112]

I understand that China Clays are color all the way through, for sure. But injection molding (the injection of molten plastic mixtures under pressure into a hollow mold) would mean the chip is the *same* color all the way through, with spots then being surface imprinted? I find it hard to figure out how to injection mold multiple colors all the way through the chip? Maybe I'm missing something and a more knowledgeable member can speak up on how injection-molding of different spot colors all-the-way through is accomplished.

 

[TheOffalo]

https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/where-to-buy-china-clay-faux-clay-now.80969/post-1663467

 

[diablo2112]

Thanks, that was a most-useful post!

 

[TheOffalo]

@CrazyEddie’s posts often are!

 

[CrazyEddie]

Ceramic chips are made using injection molding. They're made in a single color (white) using a one-part mold. The white blanks are then printed on using dye-sublimation printing, which prints the design onto the surface of the chip (and in fact embeds the ink very slightly into the surface of the chip - you can see this in your picture, where the ink-bearing layer is a few thousandths of an inch thick).

Most other injection-molded plastic chips such as China clays are made using multi-color molds, where each different color has its own partial mold. The chip then doesn't need to be printed on, and each color goes all the way through the chip (or at least partway through the chip - the exact geometry depends on how the molds were designed). The color comes from using different colors of plastic.

FYI, these types of molds are also known as "single-shot" or "multi-shot" because injecting the plastic into the mold is called a "shot", and a multi-color mold uses multiple injections of different colors of plastic to produce a single finished piece.

Multi-shot injection molding will produce pieces which are very nearly identical. Each piece conforms to the mold; each color is a separate partial mold and that color conforms to the shape of its partial mold. For example, here are some injection molded fake Paulsons that were fabricated by a Chinese injection molding plastics firm and used by fraudsters to (unsuccessfully) steal from a casino:

Note that the molds used to make these chips were fabricated to make the spots appear random and variable, which is something you'd see in real compression-molded clay chips. But even though they're squiggly and random-looking, you can tell that they're actually perfectly consistent - the "random" spots are exactly the same on every chip!

Here's another example, using the side view of stacks of those same chips. You can see that the spots form perfect X-shapes on the sides of the chips, and that every chip has the same X-shapes:

Whereas real compression-molded chips have highly variable spots, with no two chips having anything close to the same appearance:

Notice how the position of the hats is in a very different place in these spots. This would never happen if these chips were injection-molded:

Compression-molded chips have such high variation in the exact shape and placement of their spots because, unlike with injection molding, each color does not have its own mold! Instead, the different colors are manually assembled into the shape of a chip, and then the entire chip - with all of its different colors - is molded at once in a single step:

Because the inserts are manually cut and manually placed, and because the whole chip is pressed at once, the plastic is "squished" by the press into unpredictable and naturally-varying shapes, causing the small but clearly noticeable differences from spot to spot and from chip to chip. This is a security feature! It's one way that you can tell the difference between a real compression-molded clay chip and an injection-molded fake! It's why the Maryland Live fraudsters were caught; a layman will be fooled by such convincing counterfeits, but a trained and experienced casino staffer will spot them immediately upon close examination (and very often instantly upon handling, or even glancing at them).

Now, that said, injection molding isn't perfectly consistent. There are a lot of factors that can affect the outcome of a single piece, things like how hot the plastic gets before it's injected, how long the mold stays closed, how forcefully the piece is ejected from the mold, and so on. These are factors that the mold operator can control, and they'll be adjusted during the press run in order to get pieces that are as consistent and correct as possible. But nothing's perfect, and so if you look very closely at two different chips you may spot very small differences between them. But the nature of those differences is minute and accidental, whereas the nature of the differences between two different compression-molded chips is substantial and intentional.

Hope this helps to illustrate and explain the kinds of results you're seeing from your close examination of your new chips. I hope you're enjoying them! Welcome to the forum.

 

[diablo2112]

Wow, thanks for the masterclass. This site is awesome!