[Wylecoyo]

It depends on which colors you put together - the whites are a bad mix with any color, especially the blue, but most of my others seem to be fine together.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Don't know if this is what's happening in this case, but in general, blue pigments are very fine. We use a fair amount here making some of our blue inks and it's not uncommon for one of my batchmakers to get "smurfed" while dumping the pigment. In fact, most of them wear the full bunny suits and masks now when working with blues. This is all despite having decent suction going to help get rid of the dust while pouring.

So assuming Paulson is using a typical blue pigment, the pigment is so small that it can "escape" the mold much easier than any of the other colors.

[Wylecoyo]

Where is "here" spiff? Sounds like it could be an interesting place.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Here is work. We combine solvents, resins, and pigments to make coating inks. The chemistry's somewhat similar I guess to making chips. I'm sure they use many of the same components we do. It's just formulated and made for 2 VERY different processes!

It can be interesting. I like it anyway. But then again, I went to school to be a chemical engineer and I also spend 1000's on poker chips, so that right there tells you enough about my mindset!

[Wylecoyo]

Sweet, it is always nice to hear from someone who loves their job and being a chemical engineer sounds pretty interesting to me.

If you are ever out of work you could probably use your education to start a meth lab or something. But lets hope not.

[ThorCavalier]

Call me crazy, but I really like the way the white spots look on the blue chips after they've been shuffled together for a while. I don't think I'd want that blue all over the other denominations, but when they've been shuffled amongst themselves I like the way they look. All of the Bellagio $1 chips I've seen end up with light blue spots, and they are the best looking $1 chips I've seen.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Originally Posted by Wylecoyo

Sweet, it is always nice to hear from someone who loves their job and being a chemical engineer sounds pretty interesting to me.

If you are ever out of work you could probably use your education to start a meth lab or something. But lets hope not.

You have no idea how right you are. Most people would be amazed and should be frightened at the kinds of nasty things that can be made with pretty basic MacGyver chemistry.

For the record, I've never done a meth lab or anything like that! I don't know the process or ever cared to find out, but from what I understand, it's really not that hard to do. Makes sense when you think about the kinds of people running meth labs. They're not exactly ex-NASA engineers. Of course they also tend to blow themselves up every so often! We actually used to kid around at school (after 9 or 19 beers of course) how we could make one batch and make enough to pay all of our tuitions and still have enough left for one hell of a party. Too chicken to ever do it though.

One scary example from a place where I used to work. We had a room with a pretty big chiller and a big boiler in it. We needed cold water and steam in different parts of the process. There were warnings that if there were ever a coolant leak, if you could turn off the boiler, do it, otherwise, RUN! Turned out that one of the coolants used would decompose into, essentially, nerve gas if it got too hot. That was fun to know.

Sorry, I've got guys in black coats at my door now...

Thread hijack, what?

[jello-broom]

Being an artist I know about colors and such ... and I know that certain dark blue pigments or dyes can be VERY overpowering towards other colors ... I'm sure there's no difference in composition or production between the blue chips and all the other colors in the Paulson home sets, it's just the nature of the pigment/dye that's used for the dark blue chips ... the pigment is so strong that not alot of it is needed to produce the wanted resulting color, thus also causing that color to "infect" other lighter colors ...