Post #710103 by howlinowl on Tue, Mar 4, 2014 8:16 AM

On 2014-03-04 05:32, uncle trav wrote:
It is strange that they made two sizes of this one mug. Juice mug, kids mug? I wonder how long it took for the molds used to make the mugs to degrade in detail. I'm sure as soon as the mold was ready to go that they pumped out thousands at a time. Most early mugs of any company have nice detail that gets very bad in the later mugs.

I have kind of a theory about that. Everybody probably knows of the tiki salt and pepper shakers they used to sell at Walgreens a few years back? Well, once my wife took mine off of my high-top table to use and didn't put them back. One of them got shanghi'ed by my then 2 year old daughter and broken. The next season (they seemed to show up just about springtime every year, I went to purchase a couple more. Got them home and they were considerably smaller and less detailed than the ones before. What I figured happened is that they didn't have the original to make a mold of, so they made the mold of an exsisting shaker. The original figure that the original mold was probably bigger than the shakers to allow for shrinkage during fireing in the kiln. The new shakers shrunk down smaller than the originals and with less detail. May be what happened to the mug also.....later mugs made from a mold made from an original mold, thus shrunk smaller than original. Anyway, it's a theory.

howlinowl