A few days ago, my pal Reggie Gummer posted about a set of chips from the Santa Ana Star, near Albuquerque, NM. Having a friend that can see the casino from his back porch and that the friend would be visiting me soon (today) I asked him to stop by the casino and pick up a few $1's and one $5.

Well, he did and now that I have them, I noticed several things that I will comment on, as follows.

I am fairly certain that Icon is the manufacturer, however, there is no evidence of a manumark anywhere on the chip, even under a UV light. But, while looking for such a mark, I noticed that the denomination of each chip, in addition to being printed on both sides, also appears 3 times around the rolling edge; incused!

Also, each chip appears to have been cut, with a circular cutting device (saw), as the face of each chip has concentric, circular groove patterns, which appear to have picked up some brownish discoloration material. And surprisingly enough, these chips are dirty with that brownish discoloration to an extent that belies these as being a . A perplexing more, is that Icon chips are ceramic, compression molded chips. So perhaps the circular patterns are a function of some sort of polishing or sanding process.

Hopefully, the composite below shows the incused denomination (I used pencil lead to highlight the center chip) in image C. The detail of image B is intended to show the brownish discoloration in a circular pattern, while image D shows both the 41 and $5 when illuminated with UV light. Image A just shows the two denominations, however, you can see the same brownish discoloration on the edges of the inserts.

So, what is remarkable to me, is that it appears that the "blanks" for these kind of chips seem to be cut from a cylinder of material and not compression molded. I would be interested in additional observations, especially if anyone is aware of the specific manufacturing process.

Thank for looking!

Jim