extreme517
Straight
Wow...this forum has a ton of activity! I loved the glory days of CT and never quite followed this forum until recently even though I registered a few years back. Chipping has come a LONG way since 2005.
Back when I first fell in love with REAL clay chips options were very slim. ASM was the only readily available option for small-timers and they only offered solids or 312 spotted chips. So, this is how I went about piecing together a cash set all those years ago:
What you're looking at is an actual Rincon $1 chip...we were able to find those for around 67 cents a piece back then (probably still that same price if/as they can be found). This jumped out at me as a great option as I didn't want a white $1 and these Rincon $1s had a different edge spot type than what could be gotten at the time ordering through ASM. So, I picked up a few racks.
Looking at the ChipGuide, Rincon had an arc yellow 50 cent chip that looked amazing, so that got me thinking about ordering some blanks from ASM. I knew they would never do the inlay to match, so I had to figure out custom labels and that was a chore to get done at that time (no dedicated forum with perfect inlays readily available). A quarter is obviously much more useful than a 50 center, but those arc yellow chips were so great looking that I HAD to figure out how to do some customs like that. I also needed to round out with some larger denoms and 312 was the only spot pattern available. The actual Rincon $5 was red/pink and the $25 was green/orange, so I took a shot at doing something in the ballpark of those.
I ordered up a bunch of blanks from ASM and then found someone to print up some labels...it was a hassle trying to get the fonts right, etc. And they're just paper labels, but I sprayed them all with a matte finish before applying to try to protect the labels and give them a bit of a textured feel. It was hard getting templates to line up for printing on sheets of labels, so the centering isn't great in general and a far cry from the custom labeled sets I see here nowadays. Nonetheless, these chips have held up well and gotten a lot of use!
I figured it would at least be interesting for some of you to see these and know that the availability and variety in the current home market blows away anything that was happening at that time. I will say that the actual $1 Rincon chips are manufactured to much higher tolerances than the home market ASMs of that time. Those blue $1s are truly artful, beautiful chips and I love that I was able to build a set around them and get a lot of use from them!
Back when I first fell in love with REAL clay chips options were very slim. ASM was the only readily available option for small-timers and they only offered solids or 312 spotted chips. So, this is how I went about piecing together a cash set all those years ago:
What you're looking at is an actual Rincon $1 chip...we were able to find those for around 67 cents a piece back then (probably still that same price if/as they can be found). This jumped out at me as a great option as I didn't want a white $1 and these Rincon $1s had a different edge spot type than what could be gotten at the time ordering through ASM. So, I picked up a few racks.
Looking at the ChipGuide, Rincon had an arc yellow 50 cent chip that looked amazing, so that got me thinking about ordering some blanks from ASM. I knew they would never do the inlay to match, so I had to figure out custom labels and that was a chore to get done at that time (no dedicated forum with perfect inlays readily available). A quarter is obviously much more useful than a 50 center, but those arc yellow chips were so great looking that I HAD to figure out how to do some customs like that. I also needed to round out with some larger denoms and 312 was the only spot pattern available. The actual Rincon $5 was red/pink and the $25 was green/orange, so I took a shot at doing something in the ballpark of those.
I ordered up a bunch of blanks from ASM and then found someone to print up some labels...it was a hassle trying to get the fonts right, etc. And they're just paper labels, but I sprayed them all with a matte finish before applying to try to protect the labels and give them a bit of a textured feel. It was hard getting templates to line up for printing on sheets of labels, so the centering isn't great in general and a far cry from the custom labeled sets I see here nowadays. Nonetheless, these chips have held up well and gotten a lot of use!
I figured it would at least be interesting for some of you to see these and know that the availability and variety in the current home market blows away anything that was happening at that time. I will say that the actual $1 Rincon chips are manufactured to much higher tolerances than the home market ASMs of that time. Those blue $1s are truly artful, beautiful chips and I love that I was able to build a set around them and get a lot of use from them!
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