Here's a link to the Youtube Videos on ChessBazaar's Hastings Chess Congress version II set. A fabulous historic reproduction set and very close to the original.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te9Twe3Ycqk&t=1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbrsHjbifLs
I have the 2.0 version. It arrived about a week or so ago. Love mine. The pieces are beautifully turned and feel great in the hand.
I have the 2.0 version. It arrived about a week or so ago. Love mine. The pieces are beautifully turned and feel great in the hand.
Its a fabulous reproduction, but would have been fantastic with antiqued boxwood pieces to give the set a vintage appearance.
I have the 2.0 version. It arrived about a week or so ago. Love mine. The pieces are beautifully turned and feel great in the hand.
Its a fabulous reproduction, but would have been fantastic with antiqued boxwood pieces to give the set a vintage appearance.
Agree. That would have been icing on the cake. Perhaps CB will offer an antiqued version in the future.
question to the long time collectors:
how do antiqued pieces age?
i'm asking because there's a comparable thing called 'vintage gloss' used on electric guitar necks to make them look vintage, and those tend to age somewhat funny 
I remember those old clocks from Sussex clubs in the 1950s. I wonder what happened to them all.
I have The Hastings reproduction and I have to say it is not very well made and is inaccurate. For example, the knights are way too chunky and the bishops’ heads are way too fat and big while the rest of the pieces lack the proportion and beauty of the original Hastings set. I believe the main reason why the Chessbazaar’s reproduction did not turn out that well is because they must have used google images as their templates. Problem with using google images as model is that the pictures are never of individual chess pieces but rather of the whole set which usually appear unclearly in a vintage black and white photo taken from a chess tournament. Second, it goes back to lack of understanding of aesthetic aspects and correct proportion and ratio in chess on part of the woodturner. Chessbazaar had the Hastings set on sale both in ebony and padauk wood for a very long time to clear them as if they intended to come out with a better version in the future which I have not seen as yet.
I like it perhaps a Christmas addition for my collection which is growing a bit more this year. I'm still awaiting some replacement pieces from the sets I've just ordered. Had a little problem with my Hungarian reproduced set. Some pieces weren't up to par, perhaps damaged by courier rough handling. Remedied soon though...