Saturday, January 23, 2010

Anker's Mosaic Set
















At long last, I have received my Anker's Mosaic Set thanks to 'The Toy House'. The Mosaic set was reproduced for a very short time a few years ago and is already considered a collectors item. I believe Chris may still have one set available and if you can, I urge you to purchase it. You won't be disappointed. As there is no guide book with this set, go to: http://cva.flying-cat.de/ to see the original booklet that came in the original sets. It can be printed out.

There are no less than 547 stones in four colors, Yellow, Blue, Red and Black. There are three different sizes. full square, triangle, and quarter triangle. The set comes in two layers Part A and Part B. Each layer is laid out on a piece of wood surrounded by a wood frame. On each end is an elastic cord attached to lift the layers out of the storage box. The cover contains the pattern for layer A while the pattern for layer B is a single sheet loose on the inside bottom of the box.

My only real comment at this stage is this set appears to have been manufactured before Richter's Stones were change to todays NS standard. I did a quick short pattern and tried to set up a small building to see how the floor pattern would look. I discovered the stones do not line up with the standard stones. No real problem however; there are two ways to solve this. First: you can insert stone number 69 or 31 to fill the gap. The second solution is to use Anker's Conversion Set NF-NS which The Toy House also carries.

With the aid of some cardboard and Balsa wood, I quickly made a small frame to fit a 6 x 8 pattern. Some spacers cut from cardboard allows me to adjust the amount of stones inside the frame. It's not that I'm lazy, it's just this way; I can spend time with the wife in the den playing with my set designing different patterns while she watches her favorite TV shows thus keeping peace rather then myself in one room alone while she sits alone in the den building a head of steam. . Clever Yes! Here is a shot of the frame I made and one of the patterns in the set.

4 comments:

chris said...

I appreciate your impressions of the mosaic set and I especially like your portable building tray idea to enjoy pattern creation conveniently (as you say) and independently of the larger stone building sets. All in all, another helpful post and well-done. Thank you.

Turbulence training said...

I like the idea of mosaic in this case. Its just the creative mind which make things happen and convert the ideas to practical examples. Thanks

Unknown said...

The link for the original mosaic set booklet is now obsolete. Can anyone provide the correct link? Thank you... (posted 12/5/2014)

Unknown said...

Jon Stolz, Proprietor of the ToyHouse, provided me with the correct link. You will find a comprehensive archive of actual photos of Anchor design books (hundreds - thousands?) here and you can access the archive free and print anything. Fantastic!
Here is the link:
http://ankerstein.ch/archiv/

 
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