New Anchor Blocks, Old Plan

Yes, the plans that come with modern Ankerstein sets are reproductions of old plans themselves, but I have gone a bit older, and a little further afield, for this one.

From the scans of small caliber (KK = Klein Kaliber), Old Series (AF = Alte Folge) set number 8, this is from page 6. CDrom, or online.

Anchor kept adding different, ever more specialized, stones, especially in the large caliber (GK = Grosse Kaliber), new series (NF = Neue Folge -- there's also an NS = Neue Serie, but enough of that for now).

I often like to go back to the designs for the simpler stones. This example was built with sets 6 and 6A, but there are no stones not found in a 6, and very little not found in a 4 -- just more of them.

Building it with a 6 and a 4 would require only a little creative substitution.

I think anyone with a set 4 should seriously consider getting a set 6 as a next step, rather than a 4A: it gives them extras of the most useful stones; it gets them into the standard full-size box that will match the expansion sets from 6A on; and if the set 4 turns out to not be earning its keep after one has moved on with 6A, 8A, etc, the set 4 would make a great gift to get someone else into Anchor building.

Unit & Anchor redux

Continuing yesterday's program of building Anker Blocks designs with Unit Blocks, but moving on to a bit larger structure, and this time with the same structure in Ankerstein for comparison.

Since my Unit Blocks are a smaller "table top" size, I have used small caliber KK Ankerstein, so the size difference is comparable to standard large caliber GK stones used with standard sized Unit Blocks, understated here by about 11%.

Studying this OA Richter plan sheet turned up a "KK" annotation, although it is filed under GK-NF on both the CDroms and at the download site. It also has the older double height column pieces, instead of the later single height. Not a big deal. One of the charms of the Anchor plan sheets is that they are so widely usable with different sets, providing you don't come up short on stones.

Unit Block building from Anchor plans

The other day I showed a simple structure from an Ankerstein plan sheet. Today I built three of the structures from that sheet using Unit Blocks instead of Anchor Stones.

We can get away with making up the "larger" sizes of Anchor blocks with double thicknesses of unit blocks because the latter are so much larger for equivalent blocks: the standard 1 3/8 x 2 3/4 x 5 1/2 unit block is equivalent to an Anchor #15, but twice as long, twice as wide and twice as thick.

I've used two different methods of substituting pairs of unit blocks and half-units for the specified Anker Block #5, which is one and a half unit blocks long: in two of the structures I have overlapped pairs of unit and half-unit blocks, providing a little extra stability and perhaps improving esthetics; in the other I have used the half-units as cap and base to a pillar of paired unit blocks.

Relatively few of the simpler Anchor structures use the length of the #5 structurally (on this plan sheet, it is mostly the crosses), but if you need them, I am sure our friends at Barclay Blocks would be happy to make you some "Sesqui-Unit Blocks," and perhaps even add them to their line.

For the steeple, Anchor #288, I used a pair of ramps, back to back. That only provides the taper in one direction, but I think it still looks good. Cutting the other tapers into a sacrificed pair of ramps would not be beyond most casual home woodworkers. Aleternatively, Barclay Blocks would probably be willing to make these as well.

The low step in one picture is a block from another set, substituting for an Anchor #69. Barclay Blocks has this in unit block size as a "Short Narrow Roof Plank."

The plan in my earlier post can be seen in enlarged form, as almost all the images here, by clicking on it. An even larger version is available online under Downloads of anchor material: Neue Folge building and layer plans: 00.

Sun blocks

When I finally got together the set of Unit Blocks to do the Walker stuff, that also meant I finally had a set of blocks large enough and stable enough to be used outside on a wobbly table.

So I dragged the wobbly table out of the garage, set it on the grass under the cherry tree, and built the bridge from the Walker book, with a few modifications, of course.

My assistant seems far more interested in a bird in the apple tree.