Constructing my Cape Kennedy Set box inners made me regularly compare my toy with Ferryman's mint example. I noticed a major difference between the crawler-gantry beds of both toys.
My toy, above and below, has a fixed rectangular 'wall' around the bed where the gantry fits onto the crawler. My red gantry base is naked. It simply slots into the walled bed and the four holes.
Ferryman's toy has a blue plate fitted to the base of the gantry with pegs at each corner.
More startling, there's no wall on the crawler bed. It's completely flat! The two central pillars in the middle of the crawler beds are different as well. Mine is boxy and has a hole in the top. Ferryman's below is rounder and has no hole.
How do you explain these differences readers?
POSTSCRIPT:
Reader Lance's insightful comments have prompted me to add some pictures of how the gantry attaches to its bed. On my own toy its via a central gantry female pillar which fits over a large blue male peg on the crawler bed as shown below.
As for other version, its hard to say if it possesses a central female pillar below the blue plate which then fits over the male peg. I don't have any pictures of it. Here's what I do have, in position and in the box.
Its interesting to compare the toys to the real thing outside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building in 1967! Can't see a gantry bed! Mine's the winner! ha ha!
image: nasa
I would presume that they are probably made at different plants. Otherwise one is a later issue of the toy with "improvments". Looking at yours, the central post's tabs are broke from being put together and removed. A logical fix to this would be to make it solid but that would affect how the gantry joined. So odds are they came up with the platform but it needed larger posts to secure it to the crawler. So to make the post holes bigger, the wall was removed. The central post was kept to give the platform more stability and not sag in the middle.
ReplyDeleteAt least that's my guess.
Of course, now that I published that comment I tlooked closer at the pics of your version and think my previous post is in the wrong order.
ReplyDeleteIt appears that the lower left post hole in your pic looks to be partly sunken, like the mold had been plugged to make a large post hole into a small one.
It is more likely that your version is a later, cost savings version.
One less piece to make, no platform. So we plug the large holes and make a smaller hole in the plug for the gantry pegs. We add a small raised wall for extra stability while we are modifying the mold.
I'm unsure of the central post though. Perhaps it was indeed for support of the platform initially and then was changed to accept a peg for supporting the gantry. I do not know how the gantry attached to the platform besides the small pegs.
Fab insights and observations Lance. Very constructive and helpful. I agree with you that my version was probably a cheaper simpler toy costing a bit less to make. I would like to compare it next to one of the others but I don't know anyone with a Cape Ken set near me! I must check the rival toy by Countdown and see what that's like on the crawler.
ReplyDelete