My ’60s Soviet Shkolnik II set

Here is a nice Soviet carbolite Shkolnik II from the ’60s I acquired recently. This design originates from the ’50s though. ‘Shkolnik’ means ‘scholar’, which I guess suggests its use as an analysis set.

Produced at Kievplastmass in Ukraine.

I took this photo before I removed the beige ribbed felts, stuffed the hollow pieces with tungsten putty for extra weight, and refelted them with nice purple felts.

Note that the black queen lacks spikes on her crown. I assume they wore off, as I don’t see signs of them breaking off.

And yeah, the pieces look a little cramped on the board it came with. It’s a Soviet convention to use tight squares, but I will probably get a marginally larger board at some point.

Here is the white king with its new purple felts. I managed to add quite a bit of weight to it by stuffing it full of tungsten putty! It went from 18.73 g to 46.15 g (a 146.4% increase!).

For some reason the white king became the heaviest; the black king ended up 11% lighter, at 35.07 g. I guess the black king was just a bit less hollow, so I wasn’t able to stuff quite as much tungsten inside.

I will eventually post some photos of the refelting process, and the results of how much weight I managed to add to each piece.