248 Factory With Conveyor Belt
General Information
The following information has been collected from original newspapers, catalogs, and magazines, some of which are freely available for reference below. The rest can be found in the site’s gallery. No aggregate catalogs (BrickLink, Brickset, etc.) were used.
Instructions: 8018
Advertised Part Count(s): 248 pieces
First Year Confirmed Available: 1971
USA Only. Sears Exclusive.
Most Likely Retirement Date: 1971
Last Year Seen Available: 1971
Aliases: Action Conveyor Set, Factory With Conveyor Belt
Retail Price(s): $8.87(USA)
Rarity Score(Rarity Index): 6/7
Known Box/Packing Variants
There are no currently known variants, but there could exist slight variants of the outer box.
Box/Overview
The 248 Factory With Conveyor in itself is a fairly basic Sears exclusive. It is yet another USA only set, that which had no counterpart or direct comparison from the normal Samsonite line.
What I mean is that sets like the 371 Motorized Truck Set or the 118 Motorized Train had direct counterparts (the 310 Motorized Truck Set and 116 Deluxe Motorized Train Set), but sets like the 842 Town Plan or the 248 Factory do not.
The 248 Factory might be related to the 349 Construction Vehicles Set, as they are at similar price points and were released in the same season, but that connection is purely observational at best.
Similar to other Sears exclusives, the set always came in a brown box:
Contents
The 248 Factory has two distinct elements that did not appear elsewhere in Samsonite's line: the conveyor belt and the 25x50 baseplate.
The baseplate is nothing special—just a 50x50 cut in half. It plays into an idea that I've had before about Samsonite offloading older/retired inventory via Sears exclusives (which would explain the discrepancies mentioned above), but that idea will be explored further at a later date.
The conveyor was a new element for 1971 worldwide, so Samsonite imported it and decidedly used it for this set.