I used to work for a company that made silver ingots, and during that time we visited a small facility in Chino, California that also made silver ingots. They were called Ten-Tex and were primarily making one ounce 999 fine silver "coins" and flat bar ingots for Sunshine Minting, a company in Idaho that owns silver mines. I found the Ten-Tex name in an old address book, and had Marvin Otten listed as a contact. My boss was hoping to include Ten-Tex in our company in some manner, but I don't believe we ever did any business other than have a visit or two. We showed them some of our products and they showed us some of theirs.
Ten-Tex was manufacturing their blank planchets in the standard manner. They created strips of silver by running the metal repeatedly through rollers until they had the thickness to the point where blanks could be punched out that had weights over 31.1 grams (one troy ounce), but not under. According to
my boss some problems with that method is how easy it is to roll the strip too thin resulting in underweight planchets, wasted labor, large quantities of scrap. If the strip is too thick the planchets turn out overweight, but can only be sold as one troy ounce, the extra metal being at the expense of the manufacturer. Another issue is that the rollers harden the silver, so the planchets then have to be annealed to soften them, adding another production step. Our company, the USVI Ingot Company, was attempting to change the way bullion coins and bars are manufactured. We wanted to minimize scrap and overweight ingots. We did not fit with Ten-Tex. They had already decided to do things their own way and it was working just fine for them. It's nice to see they were able to survive all these years, while we were around for only two or three.
I've been watching silver ingots on
ebay recently and saw some Sunshine Minting products, so decided to do a little google research, curious about Ten-Tex and what happened to them. It turns out that Ten-Tex was bought by Sunshine Mining and the entire operation moved to Idaho in the mid 1980s. Marvin Otten moved with the company. Then in 1989, Sunshine Minting was awarded a federal contract to produce blank silver coins that would be made into Silver Eagle coins by the US Mint.
Spokane Chronicle article: Silver Eagle blanks
http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...86%2C1664370Article: Silver mines and mints struggle to survive during market lows 1990
http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...97%2C3565503
Posted 09/20/2009 2:46 pm
