OK, so I bought 600 T-mold chips from Blue Chip Co. as a wedding present for one of my poker buddies. Yesterday I oiled up 100 of the chips, and it took a while doing it by hand with my fingers -- maybe an hour and a half to do 100 chips. Today in the supermarket I was looking for some kind of brush I might use instead and came across a new idea that works well.
Here are the chips. The colors I got are mustard, blood red, dark green, charcoal gray, purple.
The helpful tool I came across is this foam "polish applicator" made for polishing shoes and boots. It does not have any polish or soap on it. It is just a springy sponge attached to a plastic handle. It's round and just a little bigger than chip size. It seemed like it might be the perfect way to oil my T-mold blanks.
It works almost like a cookie cutter or rubber stamp, and unbelievably fast. Just press it into a shallow bowl filled with mineral oil to let it suck up some oil, then "stamp" your chips. Since the sponge is a little bigger than the chip, it gets about half the edge done as well. I only needed to fill the sponge with mineral oil about 3 times to do 100 chips.
You pretty quickly learn how much to press down to get the oil into all the crevices of the mold, and rocking it around a little helps coat the rolling edge. I found I can stamp one side of 100 chips in about 5 or 10 minutes this way. Let sit for a bit, then turn the chips over. Do the other side.
Here are some images during oiling:
The sponge sometimes leaves a few tiny bubbles on the surface, but this is not a problem. The last step is to pick up each chip, wipe it by spinning in a cloth, which ensures that the rolling edge gets completely oiled, and set down to dry.
This method is very speedy, efficient, uses less mineral oil than dipping or tossing, and is much less messy.
Here are 100 chips in the middle of being oiled.
Here is a before-after shot. The chips on the left are as they come from manufacturing. The chips on the right are after oiling. The purple chips are more saturated in color than this sunlight exposure suggests.
Will J.
-wijwij
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