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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Casino Chip Display RefinedQuality Casino Chip Display at Fair PriceSeptember 11, 2006 -- Dedicated Casino Chip Collection Folks Tell what a good Display IS ! Engineering a Casino Chip Display or Designing one is a series of trade-offs. In this short discourse we discuss some of the tradeoffs involved. It is our hope that you will find that the choices we have made in creating a line of Casino Chip Display Cases will seem as rational and well reasoned to you, as it does to us. GLAZING ... Glazing is the term generally used for the transparent covering, glass or plastic or whatever ... that protects the displayed item or collection beneath it. The most common glazing materials are plastics, or glasses of one kind or another. Plastic offers the advantage of being less easy to break in general, easier to cut and handle, and can be used in thinner layers and be structurally sound. Plastic has the disadvantageous properties of being softer, easier to scratch, slightly less transparent for a given thickness, gassing off solvents or chemicals, and being for a basic material, rather more expensive than glass. Glass offers the advantage of great clarity, rigidity, resistance to scratching (important if you clean the glazing regularly), and no risk of chemical contamination or gassing off. Both plastic and glass come in versions that have coatings (they wear off and are damaged easily) ... kinds that have UV protection built into the chemistry of the material itself (expensive in plastic, ... even more so in glass), and anti-reflection coated or surface scored (made unsmooth) versions of either material. Both also come in various thicknesses. High quality museum glass costs most than we sell our current line of display cases for! Medium quality UV plastic as used by some of our competitors reduces UV only by 30-40% overall (though the claims often are as high as 95% or more ... tests do not support this) ... and add significant cost over simple glass ... We decided on cost effective real glass. Our glass is NOT anti-reflection coated ... and it is NOT desirable to do so when you want maximum clarity of a displayed collection beneath the glazing. The simple reality is that anti-reflection coatings MUST make the glazing un-smooth and that reduces the clarity and acuity once can see the collection with. Why make something you are so proud of "fuzzy" so it does not have a spot of reflection here or there occassioally? Like many museums, we believe that good lighting of your collection, and crystal clear glass is the right choice ... As for UV protection, since most collections are displayed indoors, this is simply a waste of funds to spend for. A greater worry is heat that might fade the collection in indoors storage over time. Don't display your collection over the heater. Cool is good, Hot is bad, when it comes to any collection. Keep the collection out of sunlight, and enjoy it for a lifetime. DISPLAY STRUCTURE While one could use anything from solid wood to compressed sawdust, to plastic sawdust composites, to solid plastic or solid metals, we prefer to use real wood, though from time to time, if the price point and quality is good, we might consider a composite. Here is why we prefer wood. First of all, an admission! At heart, we are traditionalists, romantics, and simply prefer natural materials and lasting durability in products and materials. We presume that others would also prefer similar durability and lasting value, and hence prefer natural quality materials. We hand select and inspect each and every display wood we use, and do our best to get materials that are interesting, and pleasant as well as well cut. Imperfections are inevitable to some extent, but we do our best to, out of reasonable cost materials, to get the best available. Everything we deliver gets our personal attention. There is no mass production line of foreign workers pumping out a million cheap pieces for us! Well made wood lasts very well, and is dimensionally stable, structurally strong, and has a nice "hand" (feeling when touched) to it ... and a rich deep appearance that synthetics just don't offer, no matter how good the photographic process. You don't put photographs of chips in your display case, and we don't deliver display cases that are covered with pictures of wood ... you collect real chips, we deliver real wood frames! No pretenses here, let's keep it real! (wink) BACKING MATERIAL We use Masonite as the backing material, we are careful to let it gas off for some time, and often keep it shelved or even sun dry it to allow any residual solvents or gases to escape before we use it in a display. At every point in material choice, we are concerned with making a display that will expose your collection to as little chemical or solvent 'dose' as possible. We tried using other materials, including glass, natural wood, plastics, but for the money, masonite, well aged and dried, is a good, cost effective choice. HARDWARE Access to the back of the display to "put and take" your chips is by removing the masonite, which is held in by 10 swivel tabs that keep it compressed against the display material inside, holding your chips and the display matrix (that holds the chips) securely but gently. Stainless Steel screws hold the aluminum swivel tabs firmly in the wood of the display case. CASINO CHIP HOLDER (The Matrix) Our inserts are black with black backing material, leaving the emphasis visually on your collection, not on the backing or holding material for the chips. While we like the idea of a fully natural holding matrix, and experimented with having museum board, natural wood, compressed hard felt wool, and a variety of other materials die cut for this purpose, in the end, we decided that carefully chosen and well gassed off firm foam with a velvet layer on the surface and black paper behind ... was the best combination. None of the natural materials we found were resilient enough to allow us to remove our chips and replace them or move them around over time as our collection changed or grew, without the matrix losing its "grip" on our chips. We wanted a matrix that, with the chips in it, would allow easy insertion and removal from the display without risking any of the chips falling or being damaged. That meant something resilient enough to give a good grip on the chips. Ergo synthetics in this case. We are, again, careful to make sure that they are stored a time, aired out, and gas off well before used in our Displays. Our experience is that greens, blues, reds, pinks, or a variety of other bright and exciting colors simply distract from a nice collection. Classic Black is best. (You don't go off to a formal affair in a pink or blue tuxedo, do you?) CONCLUSION That is the basics of the tradeoffs in a Casino Chip Display design. We can, of course, make you one like or better than the one that houses the declaration of independence, if you are REALLY determined to have "the best" ... else ... well ... we think we have put together a very nice one at a durn good price ... great value ... and that is what we would want, so that is what we offer you. (hey, did someone say "golden rule" ? For More Information Contact: |
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