quote:
Originally posted by Irishraider
Only grasping and throwing out ideas but, it could have come from the same assay lot. They may have melted it down from a much larger ingot and put them into these 10oz. bars and stamped them with the same number if lets say 5 of them came from the same larger ingot. Just an idea, I do not know for sure.
Yes, exactly. The silver arrived at our factory in large ingots that weighed approx. 1000 oz. Many were stamped Engelhard or Johnson-Matthey. They were melted in batches and poured into billet molds. The billets were then extruded, and the long bars were cut to length/weight, polished, and stamped in a punch press. The lot numbers were stamped by hand as I recall, hence slightly different locations on the bar. There would be approximately 100ea. 10-oz ingots in each assay batch. The weights of the large ingots varied by a couple of hundred ounces, so it's a rough estimate re. the number of ingots per batch.