Thingies

Apart from the options already mentioned in my last post, there is also lost wax casting. This can tie in with either pewter or aluminium casting and works well for complex shapes that won't work with a two part mould. Although the wax can be partially reclaimed and padded out with cheap candle wax (the proper wax comes in various grades, and buying softer stuff can be offset by melting in harder candle wax), it's still too expensive.

So it looks like we're back to the "custom poker chip" idea. Or something similar. I found a supplier of blank, white plastic tokens. I've ordered their smallest quantity, a ten pack, to test how well it works.

I had found a supplier of "blank" poker chips in baches of 120 chips for $12 - which amounts to 12c each. This is in line with buying the poker sets from BigW or KMart - they have 200 and 300 chip sets for $20 and $30 respectively. The ten pack of blanks cost me $3 (including postage) so that's 30c per blank, but they also have 100 packs for $16 (16c each).

That's still higher than the blank poker chips (which aren't blank, they have designs on the borders) but the poker chips have the big disadvantage that they come in sets of four colours. The white ones came out okay, the green ones looked okay, but the blue and black ones were very meh. So being able to buy all white ones makes printing designs much easier.