"BCC" stands for Blue Chip Company, LLC, a recently formed chip manufacturer (2004, or so) with roots from Paul-Son Gaming. Presently, BCC makes chips for the casino industry and the home gaming market with clay-composition chips, as well as the newer heavy plastic chips. The Sahara was an early customer of BCC with a $1 chip that was made to look similar to the then current $1 chip of the Sahara that was made by GPI-USA (Paul-Son). Both the GPI chip (TCR# N2364) and the BCC chip (TCR# E3431) used the same inlay artwork and general chip color (grey) but there was a subtle, yet big difference in the inserts.

The GPI issue had 4 fuchsia and 4 navy inserts, wherein the fuchsia’s were 1/4" in size and the navy's were 1/8" in size.

TCR#: N2364 (Scan courtesy of the MoGH's ChipGuide.)

The BCC examples also used fuchsia and navy inserts, but they were reduced from 4 of each color, to 2 of each color and appeared in the same sizes, i.e., 1/4" and 1/8" respectively.

TCR#: E3431 (Scan courtesy of the MoGH's ChipGuide.)

There were 2 other differences between these chip, one of which was the mold patterns, with GPI having the traditional hat and cane mold and BCC using their then new, starburst mold. As for the other difference, well one could see right away that BCC was having some production quality issues!

While the GPI chips were the typical (and highly regarded) Paul-Son made chips that are so uniform and consistent between every chip, the BCC chips had shade differences (light grey to dark grey) and a really poor inlay alignment problem. That problem was reflected in inlays being off-center, or overly-pressed resulting in clay material creeping over the edge of the inlay (making the inlay look distorted; not round).

Couple this with the mold (starburst) not being recessed very deep into the chip and the printing of the inlays ranging from light to dark, the chips just looked sloppy. (It should be noted that the issues of the early days for BCC have pretty much been corrected over the past several years.)

However, the point of this post is to recognize a situation with these chips that I am not certain has been raised previously, nor if the condition has presented itself for other chips from other manufacturers using the heat and pressure method of molding chips.

As some collectors are aware, the chip manufacturing process is done in multiple steps, some of which are apparent and some that are not so obvious. (Note again, I have never toured any of the manufacturing facilities, so some of what I present here may be conjecture or speculation on my part.) Basically, when dealing with clay-composition chips that will have both inserts and a paper or mylar inlay, said chips are not made from start to finish (of just one chip) in a singular process. There are at least 2 major steps or phases. The first being to make a blank chip (a bunch of them) that will then have the insert(s) and inlays affixed as a second step.

A blank, in the instance of the BCC $1 Sahara chips should consisted of making a pre-notched blank in which the center (on both sides) has a very shallow, recessed landing spot for the inlays. Blanks are made in the thousands and for all I know, the manufacturer is continually using the presses/molds to churn out blanks in a variety of colors and notched configurations. In this instance, the notched configuration should have been 2, ¼” notches at 12 and 6 o’clock position and 2, 1/8” notches at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions.

Having buckets and buckets of these blanks, a worker, also supplied with large quantities of ¼” fuschia insert pieces and 1/8” navy insert pieces and inlays, would assemble a chip into a mold (cups) and repeat this process for as many cups are mounted to a steel plate, with a matching set of cups (also mounted to a steel plate) suspended over the first set of cups and all within the jaws of a press. The cups are then clamped together and after the appropriate time and application of heat, the plates are separated and a quantity of chips has just been made, where upon this process is repeated until the chip order is completed.
Whew! And if that was not enough, imagine the additional costs to have the inlays aligned, either to the insert pattern, or medal or coin aligned (or both) and/or aligned to the mold position(s)! Note that some parts of the overall process are not addressed here, like application of security measures, polishing or other ‘finish’ work.

So, after all this, what is the “observation” that I am referring to in the Subject line of this post?...
Well, if you look closely, it appears that BCC used notched blanks that were NOT configured as 2, ¼” notches at 12 and 6 o’clock position and 2, 1/8” notches at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions, but instead were notched as 2, 1/2” notches at 12 and 6 o’clock position and 2, 1/4” notches at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions and the resulting gaps were filled in with grey inserts that in many cases were NOT the same shade of grey as the body of the chip.
Sometimes the colors were a match, but many times they were not and when they were not, there were many examples of where 3 or more different shades of grey appeared on one chip. It can also be noticed that there are shade differences between fuchsia and navy inserts from chip to chip. So overall, with the other production issues, the $1 BCC Sahara chips just looked poorly made.

Imaged here are several scans of BCC Sahara $1 chips that were provided by Robert McColum to me last year and he simply asked, “Why do you think there are so many shade variations here?” Since I’ve had his chips so long and needed to return them at the Convention, several weeks ago I broke them out and started to try and figure out what happened. The preceding is what I think happened and I can imagine the added production costs for these chips (to BCC) at a time that they were a start-up trying to establish them selves in a well covered market.

This scan shows the light and dark differences of the printed inlays. Looking close, one can also see the shade differences between chip bodys. Note also that the top 2 rows are all TCR#: E3431, where the font for the numeral "1" is sans serifs.

(Note the sections between the paired arrows in this scan of 4 BCC made chips. Shade differences are a function of inserts not matching the shade of the chip body.)

Thanks for looking and sorry for it being such a long post!

Jim