Repaired Chips:
Greg Said:
Hi gene, yes i have seen a repaired chip from whalen. it looked flawless. i was at a chip show a year or two ago and he had a table selling his fake chips that , i think had stickers on them.i had played poker with him the night before at sahara, i dint know who he was then, so at the show i asked how and about his repairing service and he showed me one. he didnt seem to be hiding anything.

The chips on any table Dave Whalen would have been showing, would have been his cat house and other fantasy chips. He does a real good business in them. I have never know him to show repaired chips for sale.

I have known Dave for a long time and always known him to be honest.
Dave started repairing chips for his own collection. He repaired chips that he could never afford to buy. He would go around dealers junk boxes and buy drilled and broken chips for a couple bucks, repair them and put them in his collection.

Others saw what a craftsman he was and the greed took over.
I have worked with Dave on two different investigations of people having chips fixed by him, for their own collections per them, then selling then as the real thing. Dave has always been honest giving me names and what chips he had repaired.
Make no doubt about it, David is a REAL craftsman when repairing chips.

Greg said:
i think a service using xray and experts in our community could tell a repaired chip.

Yes xrays will show a chip has been repaired in most cases. But there is a hitch. You have to know how to read what you are seeing.

David Whalen gave me a chip valued in the $125 range that he had bought drilled, repaired the drill hole, and had in his collection. Somewhere along the line he got a nice one undrilled and gave me the repaired one. It was good. I could not tell the difference when it was beside a known un-drilled one.

David Spragg, Allan Myers, and I decided to do a little investigation. We bought 3 others just like it that we suspected had also been repaired. Actually 4 as one got lost in the mail. We had several $100 dollars, lots of postal charges and Dr Myers furnished the xrays.

This is a little hard to explain without showing the xray scans so bear with me.
(the club has asked us not to show them as they using them in a bigger investigation.)

All 4 of the chips, the one Whalen gave me and the 3 we bought xrayed so close that we thought all 4 had been repaired. Not likely in our opinions. The only answer was to peel the inlays and see what we were looking at.
Mine had been repaired, none of the other 3 were repaired. They were good chips, at least they were before we peeled the inlays.

The chips were made with a hollow resin reservoir under the inlays.
Mine had been drilled thru the resin reservoir. David had repaired it perfectly.

We also xrayed some chips that had been drilled thru the edges or molds and had been repaired courtesy of Whalen. David worked with us on these.

Xrays showed the repairs perfectly on these.
BTW I believe a grading/slabbing company would have slabbed and guaranteed all 4 of our chips, if they would have gotten a foot hold in our hobby. I wonder which one of you readers, would have bought the slabbed and graded repaired chip? And don’t forget the slab/grading would have added $15 to the cost of selling you that repaired chip. As a real chip.

So to answer your question:
Yes xrays will show repairs but in the case of chips drilled through the inlay there are problems reading the xrays. (We have 3 $125 chips with only one inlay)