A Crazy Brick

Looks like i'll be watching ebay for those notes!

Hehehe, jk.

zeewool please explain I'm not following you.

Thats interesting Zeewool, because at the end of my brick last month I found two stars at the very last two. It was 1,000 1$ bills.

Let me say this Nick, I am by no means an expert on small size green seals. What little information I have on the making of these things came directly from a Giorgi press operator in DC. It was explained to me like this:

The COPE-PAK system not only overprints the notes, it cuts them, and packages them. The paper used to make these notes is supplied by Crane & Co. in Massachusetts. The backs of the notes are printed on sheets of this paper first using a grid of 32 back plates. The following day, the faces are printed using 32 face plates on the other side of each sheet. Then the sheets are trimmed and cut in half at which time these now 16 note sheets are visually spot checked for error.

These half sheets are then inserted into the COPE-PAK machines where they are overprinted, examined (by the machine itself), and packaged all without human intervention. For all practical purposes, once a sheet enters the COPE-PAK it is not seen again until the shrink wrap is removed at a bank.

Blowers, suction and grippers feed the sheets into the printing cylinders where seals and FRB letters and numbers and serial numbers are applied. When stacks of 100 sheets accumulate, they are multi-cut from both directions, and these stacks of 100 individual notes are then fed into a paper bander.

These banded stacks then pass through an open area in the machine where they 'may' be randomly spot checked again by a human. They then travel to a 32 compartment carousel that collects 10 banded stacks of notes in each compartment.

These ten stacks of 100 note4s each are then fed into another bander where they are banded again and shrink wrapped together to form 1000 note packages. Finally, the machine will again shrink wrap four of these 1000 note packages together into a 4000 note package called a 'brick'.

Just like the 'check engine' light on your car, the COPE-PAK machine is computer controlled to alert the operator of operating error. Unlike the 20-40 trouble codes that the average automobile will identify, the COPE-PAK will identify approximately 700 errors, and will automatically shut the entire system down depending on severity of the malfunction.

All of the above is substantiated by what I have read elsewhere, but evidently with the 'news to me' testimony of you folks who have found random stars in packs of regular notes, the COPE-PAK is either far more sophisticated or far more poorly designed than I could have imagined.

It may possess the ability to correct its own error and automatically print and insert a star in place of an erred note, but lacks the capability to recreate that same serial number instead of creating a star. Possibly a measure to account for paper waste?

Is it worth $250 dollars to test out a theory?

http://cgi.ebay.com/1000-One-Dollar...aultDomain_0

This brick will end with a note with 4 zeros. If that sheet was replaced with one of stars then the last note should be a star note. If that is true, the rest of the strap will not be stars due to the solid blue strap (not the stripped one for stars).

Anybody want to take one for the team?

Thanks, that's some very good and useful info.

"Sheet replacement" - I was wonder if these are the "inspected sheets" for quality control purposes. - The random pull.

Also I came across a pack where the ending numbers were NOT four 9's or 0's yet had 2 stars (last 2 notes of the brick). Interesting.

Nickelman, I do not get it. The 2 stars I found at the end of the brick were NOT in a brick ending in 4 nines and zeros.

NOT is the operative word.