Picture of the month

We have now come to the final part of the topic of building plans, as promised last month.
On last month's Picture of the Month page, I showed you the building plans for the smaller sets in the various series. For orders for bigger sets, the factory delivered the stones in large boxes. The final pieces of the series were packed in furniture-sized crates. These were called "im Schrank", meaning "in the cupboard".

The cabinets had a special drawer dedicated to papers. The different box designs were of different sizes, as we saw last month. Therefore, the drawer contained a rather large pile of different shaped papers when the set was complete.

The page in the building plan booklet of the largest sets was a sizeable 36 x 26 cm. The layer drawings were printed on even larger, double-folded sheets measuring 50 cm x 37.5 cm. By comparison, the standard European A4 writing paper is 29.7 cm x 21 cm.

Unfortunately, even on sheets of this size, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether the design calls for a three-quarter stone (18,75 mm) or a five-eighth stone (15,63 mm). Imagine that even holding a life-size stone in your hand, you may not be able to make a clear distinction. The difference between the two is of millimetres (take a ruler and look at the two sizes).
Besides the plan booklets, there were other, not so obvious papers in the drawer. Floor plans were printed to assist the builder in the placement of the first layer of buildings in the booklets of the larger sets (28 and onwards) (see also Image of the Month 2016/07).

Also enclosed was a sheet showing all the stones in a given set and indicating their quantities by colour. For example here: stone 1 – 28 G (Gelb=yellow) and 48 R (Rot=red).

A sheet with insets was also included for the windows and rose windows of large churches. This was to be glued to a thin wood plate as suggested by the factory and then cut out along the contour. The ornate piece of wood had to be inserted into the empty window recesses, which then significantly raised the overall aesthetic effect. Today, a computer-controlled tool can do this very quickly and accurately, but the technology was obviously not available a hundred years ago.