I ran across this piece of brass at the convention last week. It appears to be the first die-cast brass step in the process where four chip cores are removed from the die and are ready for removal of the excess metal. Below that image is a scan of several cores after they are cleaned up and ready for the plastic molding process.

It's interesting that the process made 3 $25 cores and 1 $5 core, which must have been the ratio of the chip denominations in the order that the shop was currently filling.

I'm not a mechanical engineer and am not exactly sure how the metal casting was done. It appears that the molten brass was injected at the center region on one end and followed the runners to the cavities where the detail of the brass chip was formed. The two round marks on the center runner on the other side appear to be from the holes where the ejector pins forced the cast part out of the mold after the metal had hardened.

It's also possible this was done with a die-casting process where the metal powder is mixed with a binder and the molding done as would be done with a plastic die-cast process. The final parts would have to be sintered to fuse all the metal particles if this were done.

I showed the item to Howdy Herz who said he had a similar part but with places for six chip cores rather than four. Howdy gave a talk at the convention on how clay chips were manufactured but didn't discuss the metal slug core process.

Does anyone have any further information on how Reliable might have manufactured the cores?