Collection Highlights -
These are the highlight of recent trip to the LCS honey hole. These are not ingots I find very often, and I have not ever found one in person. I immediately snatched these up before I even started looking at the rest of the vintage rounds I have already shown, I was secretly hoping he had a whole stock pile of these but I could only get two.
These are from A-Mark and straight from 1981. I absolutely love the uniqueness of these ingots, the combination of their unique size and shape and thickness make them just great. Not a lot I could find out about the mints history all the way back to 1980, but it was able to find a little bit on Aroundworld.com, as well as another site that was a specifically talking about the history of the US VI ingot co.
It appears it's been around for a long time, being founded in 1965 and just continued to grow and evolve into a full service precious metals dealer that ends involved with many governments around the world.
As far as the ingots go, I found a blog post that made reference to the silver art bars 5th edition by Archie Kidd and it appeared to me that this bar I bought is the usvi-4, minted in 1981.
agroundworld.com
Obverse
I'm going to call this side the adverse of the front of the ingot. Since ingots are slightly different I'm going to use the side that is a little bit narrower that is meant for stacking on top of. It has the classic a- mark and their corporate logo. Followed by the words 999 pure AG 1 oz. I think it's a great looking top design and wall very busy you are able to make out the lettering and what it means
Reverse
The bottom is a little bit cleaner, clearly stating it's weight of one tryouts and or 31.1 g of pure silver. What I find a little bit more interesting is that I got two serial numbers in a row, 163 and 164. The part that I'm not quite sure how it plays in with a mark is the USVI ingot co & stamp 1981.
Look at how chunky these bars are. They are substantially thicker than most of the 1 oz rounds and bars that you pick up. And they are also significantly smaller from a diameter perspective. Clearly they need to be censor so much thicker but I really like these and kind of wish I had a whole lot more to stack up. It seems like a very efficient way to stack some silver versus rounds.