Anker plans

Inspired by a great Youtube channel for a more current brick building system (no names named :) I've started to make plans to pick up my Anker stones again.

Currently I have the GK NF boxes up to 12A, i.e. box 14. You can see the stones here and some buildings here.

So now the question is where to go next.

The easy thing would be to build more with 14. I already started experimenting with New-Series buildings (finding that I can improvise up to GK-NS 12 with the NF 14 stones).

I would also like to revisit the alternative / non-Richter plans for GK-NF 14, e.g. the ones here or here. The Delling church from the BiK (first link) looks really promising, some other models in that booklet look nice, too. From the other link, the Hotel could be interesting (simple but big), there is also a nice church and a row of old houses forming one whole (with a nod to the Lego modular buildings that retriggered my Anker itches...).

Looking through these plans, I also came across a GK-NF 8 tower which looks really funky and unusual. That might make a nice diversion.

P.S. the GK-NF 14 town wall from CVA could also be a great backdrop to my next tabletop game...

I could also revisit buildings from box 10 and 12 and extend them, e.g. adding floors, width or detail. That's another idea I had when looking at the Lego Modular Buildings - they cry out to be customized with simple additions, that should also be possible for Anker buildings. One inspiration is this nice addition to the "Holy Grail" of Anker aficionados, the Große Burg.

The next obvious choice is to get box 14A and build the new models offered by that (and then to continue with 16A, 18A and enter the gothic era...). This will also open up the CVA buildings for 16.

I'll also think about a way to showcase Anker stones in our local Kindergarten. Not sure which box to start with, though - der Kleine Gernegroß uses half sized stones which are too easy to swallow, so maybe the Starter Set is a candidate (also listed in other sources in case of availability issues). This has no small stones (each stone has at least two edges of at least one base length).

Building NS buildings with NF stones: GK-NS 12 "entry to an industrial area"

I'm starting to run out of building plans for the GK-NF 12 and 14 sets, so I've had the idea to dabble with some of the buildings for GK-NS. An attempt to build from a GK-NS 14 plan turned out harder than expected, even with some extras stones, so I looked around for smaller set NS plans and found the booklet published by the CVA with buildings for GK-NS 12.

I was hoping not to run out of stones building an NS 12 building out of the NF 14 stone pool. That worked ok in principle, and as an additional challenge there were several changes to the construction I had to make to accommodate for the differences in the form of the NS vs. NF arches. 

The first was actually a reason for a decorative change (whether it fits the architectural style of the era and the building is open for debate). Note that as always you can click on the small pictures to see a larger version.

The first layers of the entry hall. On the corners of the white tower-like building I put some of the columns 196/198 to fill the gap between the NF arches in a visually pleasing way.

The biggest issue is that many of the proper overlaps of stones of different layers do not work as designed for the NS stone sets when the NF arches are used. The following illustrations call out a few examples (marked in red) and my attempts to minimize the visual damage and the static instability.

The layer supporting the roof construction of the red building part had to be changed, too. One of the many places where the NF arches don't just replace some NS stones one-by-one but the whole area has to be solved differently, with less elegant overlaps and interlacing of the building parts than in the original NS plan.

Another example where the arrangement of stones has to be changed and the overlapping of subsequent stone layers doesn't work as cleanly as with the original NS arches

To reduce the number of edges that cut across multiple layers I have rotated the stone layers for the white tower by 180 degrees starting with the layer shown in this picture. The area marked in green profits from this, avoiding an alignment of stone edges across three layers, but in some other areas the overlap still does not work as you would expect, with stones in two layers aligned along their edges.

Not everything is about problems from the different stone sets, though - the building in itself has some nice aspects, for example in the roof construction.

Detail from the roof - this time unrelated to the NF stones used: a nice way to increase roof area by putting in some small windows in roof aprts with a different slope. On the left the completed roof windows are seen from above, on the right you can see the stones that form the window frames before the roof stones are palced on top.

Despite all difficulties and compromises I like the result. It's fun to build some more "modern", functional buildings now and then.

Completed building, front view

Completed building, view from the rear.