Meccano

The Doctor's site of geek stuff and general shite.

Baaaaarrrrrk boc boc etc etc.

Middle aged man nostalgia alert!

When I was a boy I had a Meccano set. It wasn't very big, but I managed to build a few models. As usual with small boys of that era, it was diggers, farm machinery and cranes that were the usual targets. By swapping stuff with other boys, I managed to improve it a bit but never had the quantity to build what I wanted.

30 years later we have Ebay, and as much Meccano as you want. There are the usual bunch of sad collectors who will pay £20 for a single wheel still in the box, but 'junk' used Meccano is dirt cheap. I recently bought a large pile of this and built a new set for myself. True, it's all different colours and some of the bits look like they were in the Titanic, but so what? I've had many a happy afternoon tinkering away in our conservatory with the radio on, building all the models I never had the bits for when I was 11. Just a quick Google search under Meccano shows that it is still enjoyed by thousands of nostalgic middle-aged men all over the world.

This is what small boys did before the Playstation. They built things. This little boy obviously had richer parents than mine though.

I said Diggers not N***s! An interesting model from our country's less PC times. I don't know if the N**r is a standard Meccano part! Seriously though, I don't know when this was from but it's pretty unbelievable and we can only be thankful that times have changed. Before my time luckily.

Latest model is a 6ft high tower crane.
Next project.. This is a dragline built by some other bloke on the web. Very nice, but when you see real draglines, they don't look like this. The bucket is different, they are rigged differently and they don't come on rails. That drop between the fairlead assembly and the bucket is ridiculous and would scale up to 20 foot on a real machine, limiting the dump height. Mine will have caterpillar tracks, and be true to an original design. It will also be a 'universal excavator' allowing later upgrades to face shovel or grab crane.


This guy has too much spare time.

This page is under construction. I do realise the irony of having a Meccano page under construction.