I purchased a custom set of PI Solid Walls (gallery -
http://www.chiptalk.net/forum/custom...pi-solids.html)
After "getting to know them" a little better, I thought a more detail review might help some prospective buyers. I was going to post a mini-review, but I felt the format allowed did not provide the ability to clearly show/describe my findings.
Labels Printing quality: The labels turned out pretty much as I'd hoped - clear and colored nearly identically to the submitted images.
Application: In all of the chips I found only 1 or 2 labels that were not 100% within the recessed area, and those were only just barely overlapping the recessed edge. Two labels out of 2600 is a miniscule .08%. Very acceptable.
Overall grade: A+ Molds
As I was oiling the chips I began to notice that some of the molds were 'misstamped' - for lack of a better term. It appears that either the chip slipped during stamping or that the chip was simply defective to start with. This misstamping create a shallow gash in the chip as you can see in the photo below. I would estimate that this occurs in approximately 1% of the chips regardless of color.
Overall Grade: B Appearance Edges: During the oiling I also noticed that there were scratches on the sides of some of the chips. This seemed to be more frequent in the thicker, heavier chips (see
Consistency section) - more common in the reds and purples, less so in the blacks, and rare in the greens. I consider this to be a fairly minor flaw as it does not affect functionality and is not what I believe to be a major detraction in appearance. I would estimate this occurs in about 1 chip in 12 - about 8%.
There were also some chips with chipped edges of various sizes. There were very few of these - roughly 5 or 6 out of 1300. An example is shown below.
Coloring: As you can see from the photos of the reds and greens, there are a number of chips that are darker than the rest - some only slighty and others much more so. It does appear to occur inthe blacks, but the difference is very subtle. I did not notice it in the purples or oranges, but I only ordered 50 and 25 of those respectively. In the reds and greens I would estimate it occurs in 1 chip in 28 - about 3.5%.
Faces: There were also some chips with spots/splatters of the darker color. You can see this demonstrated in the photo. These could not be removed with my fingernail and I did not attempt using any tool to remove them. This appears to occur mainly in the reds and greens - possibly the oranges, but I don't really have a large enough sample to tell.
Overall Grade: C+ Consistency Thickness: The most glaring discrepancy is in the thickness of the chips. As you can see in the photo, a stack of 40 chips by color reveals a significant difference. The reds and purples are very close to the same, while the blacks are slightly shorter, and the greens are much shorter. I included a stack of 40 unoiled greens to demonstrate that the oiling had no effect.
While this does not directly affect the functionality of the chips, it does make stack comparison (for counting) difficult as you can only compare one stack against another of the same color.
Weight: As you would imagine, the difference in thickness affects the weight. The average weights of each color are as follows:
- Red & Purple = 10.4g
- Black & Orange = 10g
- Green = 9.7g (again, oiling had no effect)
I would consider this to be a major defect. A company manufacturing a quality product should not have these large discrepancies from chip to chip.
Overall Grade: D
I hope CTers find this helpful.
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