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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;1jester, post: 812419, member: 62&quot;]Greetings, 1970 Silver Art.&nbsp; I just discovered the &quot;silver art bar&quot; talk here, and wanted to chime in.&nbsp; First I saw a nearby thread and posted there, but I see this is the more appropriate thread to put this in, so here&#039;s what I said in the other thread:</p><p><br /></p><p>Welcome, Axxa! It&#039;s nice to see you and Orpheus over here. I&#039;ve been trying for months to sign up on GoldIsMoney but they simply won&#039;t let me sign up. Anyway, I was doing a google search for some bars and this site came up and then I realized I&#039;ve been a member here for almost a decade! So it&#039;s great to see you guys (and others) over here discussing silver art bars, since I can&#039;t seem to do it on GIM.</p><p><br /></p><p>Victor, as a precautionary measure, I always liberate all my silver from whatever original packaging they&#039;re in because in many cases, the foil/packaging contains PVC, which is a big no-no. Then I give each bar a good rinse in acetone to remove any contaminants, especially poisonous PVC residue, then put the art bars that fit (standard sizes) into Airtites. The ones that don&#039;t fit I put into Saflips (made of harmless Mylar). For bigger bars, I put them into food-quality Zip-Loc bags. I hate the scourge of PVC, which has ruined many of my valuable coins, and many, many holders in use over the past 30 years contain that disgusting poison.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have a question for Orpheus or Axxa or whoever might know. I bought a Hamilton Mint American Wildlife collection, in its original box with original mylar-based holders for each of the 50 bars, and they all have simply gorgeous green/blue/turquoise peripheral toning. On the edge of each is stamped the fineness (.999) and some other symbols, and a serial number (0817 in my case). I think I saw on Axxa&#039;s website that this series had a mintage of 250, which, in light of my serial number of 817, doesn&#039;t make sense. Can anyone clarify the mintage of this series?</p><p><br /></p><p>Read more: <a href="http://www.cointalk.com/t54946-4/#ixzz0fVfhGfrT" class="internalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.cointalk.com/t54946-4/#ixzz0fVfhGfrT">http://www.cointalk.com/t54946-4/#ixzz0fVfhGfrT</a></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;d like to address another issue, concerning the &quot;producer&quot; of many bars listed in some books as &quot;Switzerland&quot;.&nbsp; Switzerland is a country, not a producer of bars, so we have to a little bit of sleuthing to find out who the producer of these bars was/is.&nbsp; And we have a fantastic clue: the CHI assayer&#039;s mark inside a circle.&nbsp; This is a trademark of Valcambi S.A., a melter/assayer and renowned producer of precious metals bars for many decades.&nbsp; They usually do Credit Suisse&#039;s bars, too.&nbsp; They are still in business and produce very high quality material.&nbsp; I&#039;d like to make a note of this so people don&#039;t continue the mistake of referring to these bars as &quot;Swiss&quot; or &quot;Switzerland&quot; bars. They&#039;re clearly Valcambi bars.</p><p><br /></p><p>And here&#039;s a quote from Morpheus 2 pages ago:</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I have this bar too, and after reading your post I went back to look at it and sure enough, the first two digits in the serial number (00085) are like yours; the first one looks like an O (letter) and the next looks like a zero (number) and get this - the third looks like the O again!&nbsp; I&#039;ll get pictures eventually.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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