Alan

Machine mades. No canes were involved.

IIRC - ~15% of all people are left handed. So it shouldn't be considered unusual to have them involved in all trades.

BP

Prob MK, but please view the use of the word "Experimental" with great doubt for 99% of it's use. Ditto for the people using it with the sole intent to empty your wallet.

Veiligglas

A backlit photo doesn't help.

I don't know that there is enough there to venture an educated guess.

Pre-sorted.

Alley for me

Because it isn't a cane cut marble. The construction difference between the two is radically different. As I said earlier - a glass imperfection is not a sign that its a handmade.

Machine made. I recommend that you stop looking for pontils....its crossing you up. If you go to a marble show you'll see many real handmades and never mistake a pontil again. You are facing the challenges of trying to learn on the Internet.

As opposed to what kind of Peppermint? The "Beachball" name seemed to die out 20 or so years ago. Peppermint with mica in the blue bands exist, but few of them. I have only ever seen one with mica across the entire marble (although I suspect a number of them exist in those OG folks that have the huge diameter Peppermint collections.

Remember that these are cane-constructed in a relatively crude glass shop. There wasn't a formula that a shop couldn't violate. Its all a matter of what canes were laid on the marver in a hurry to do the pick-up. These were made for about 1-2 cents each. Precision and repeatability were not a priority. Speed and cheap was.

Vintage. Poles don't match.

Standard Peppermint, aka "Flag"

At some level - yes. When sold online, they should be described. Personally, I don't subscribe to the "as-made" trend that has been popularized

A nice, simple combination of colors. Very pleasing to the eye. It avoids the increasingly common fetish for 5+ colors with extra glittery junk added to it to make it look like a carnival ride.

Its a damaged machine made. Try to not look at damage or imperfections as "pontils".

Vintage, but the pics are out-of-focus and the light off the surface looks....odd. Look closely to see if its been polished.

Vintage. Somewhat lighter imprint. Fine marble.

Champion furnace

It was a vintage generic jobbers box of the day. I have the same one in light pink. Akro jobbers seemed to use them, although not exclusively.

Respectfully, I think that is quite speculative without a real tie. I have seen two Akro worker personal "take home" accumulations. One I saw in-person in the former Akro employee's home. They were nice examples of production types with an eye towards quality. It was only ~200 pieces in total. But not one piece was marginal or problematic in any way. The second set was only via Roger Hardy. He had purchased some from a different Akro employee. These also were special examples with an good, practiced eye for quality and pattern. A very few types were unusual enough that they were obvious departures from what we expect - but all with a lot of eye appeal (like Imperials with a lot of glass action). One of those are what Roger referred to as "Opaque Sparklers", of which I bought a few. I still have all of the employee examples I secured through Roger Hardy. Popeyes were corkscrews. When the spinner cup wasn't working they came out as patches. Given the thousands that I saw dug, its obvious that Popeye patches failed production pattern quality control and were discarded. I've never seen a Popeye patch in intact original packaging. On another note, the main digs at the Akro site ended before some seem to think. I visited the site several time during the main digs and have a fair sense of them.

Ravenswood

It really doesn't matter. They exist in huge quantities and one can't be differentiated from another. Its actually amazing that anyone would pay more than a dollar for one.