The walking hat

Fast forward to autumn 2016. A Christmas Challenge competition had been launched on Spanner: to build any model from the classic Set 4 manual and improve upon it without altering it beyond recognition. A brilliant theme, but not too inspiring to me as I don't tend to build from plans and I am unfamiliar with those manuals.

But then Edward Lupton of MeccanoSpares.com fame issued a competing challenge! Not intentionally, of course, but it grabbed me straightaway. The idea was appealingly perverse: to create a model that somehow found a use for the 25 most useless Meccano parts ever made, as judged by Edward. Here they are:

So off I went. I laid out the 25 accursed parts on a table. I stared at them, poked them, jiggled them, arranged them in absurd ways. Many hours later I agreed violently with Edward's assessment. It was maddening to try to shoehorn all these things into a coherent model.

After a few evenings of this, rationality went out the window and my fevered brain roamed further afield. Until finally this presented itself:

Basically the same thing, no?

Behold the pilgrim's hat or capotain! It is one of the ugliest hats ever to encase a noggin, but it has the right mix of concavities and convexities to make use of all those odd curves in the required Meccano parts.

Now I just had to find a rôle for the centre fork, the rack strip, the slotted strips, the ratchet and pawls and so on. I wanted them to be mechanically justified, not just bolted on willy-nilly. But here I hit a second brick wall. If any reader can think of a mechanism that might sensibly use these parts, I'd love to know of it. (Of course one could argue that a mechanized hat is not a very sensible proposition to begin with.)

Eventually I decided that my hat's prime directives would be to fend off threats and flee from danger. To this end, the two long slotted strips serve as channels for little rotating claws (pawls) that scrabble madly forwards. The rack strip is a sort of cowcatcher that saws the air and slices up any enemies in the hat's path. Behind this are some spikes mounted on slotted strips, rattling about threateningly. The ratchet and centre fork are used for lateral self-defence. The threaded crank serves as an on-off switch.

This is the ridiculous contraption I ended up submitting, and it won second prize! Truly a glorious achievement.

Some more photos can be seen here.

The first flush

For Christmas 2014 I gave my 7-year-old a modern Meccano set, vaguely hoping it would interest her in gadgetry and mechanics. It was the Multimodels Super Construction Set #0570, 25 models, 640+ parts, ages 8-88, $79.99.

It did not immediately seize her attention. But one sunny spring day an unseen psychic force pulled me towards the dark closet where it lay, and I opened it. It was a nice surprise to see how many Meccano parts had survived unchanged from the glory days, and painful to see how many had been replaced by barely usable plastic and rubber.

The manual was ludicrously drab and unappealing, but I picked a random model and it came together well enough. I have absolutely no idea what it is meant to be... If you do, please let us know in a comment!

Unidentified moving thing, from page 52 of this manual

At this point some echoes of the childhood thrill came back. I wonder if I could still have turned back? But alas, I did not.

Over the next few months I cajoled my daughter into various joint efforts. She is far more creative than me and loves making things, but the mechanical aspects (and the torture of endless nutting and bolting) did not appeal to her. So the Meccano gradually became "my thing" and I dropped any pretense otherwise.

But I soon found myself hamstrung by lack of parts - just like my 10-year-old self. Here are two models I did manage to make, barely:

Working cable car or ski gondola thing

Demonstration of a Schmidt coupling

Finally I fell into the arms of eBay.com, which kindly reminds me that I made my first order on July 28, 2015: one lot of "Meccano Erectror Set Pieces Gears Wheels Axles Screws Washers Tools" for $8.50. This must have opened the floodgates: I appear to have bought 342 more Meccano-related items on eBay since then... not to mention the odd unmissable deal on Amazon, Craigslist, or shopgoodwill.com... ouch. I did not until this second quite take stock of this situation. I am on a Meccano diet, effective immediately! There's my resolution for 2017.

And thus began the golden age, subject of a future blog post.

Introduction

Meccano is a legendary, beautiful construction toy system created in 1901 by Frank Hornby in Liverpool, England. It spread worldwide and was for decades a shared language and culture embraced by millions of children and many adults. It is documented in great detail by many excellent websites; www.alansmeccano.org is a good starting point. This blog is a chronicle of my own Meccano experiences. I hope that some of them are helpful or encouraging to other burgeoning Meccano nuts.

I had some Meccano growing up in Spain in the 1970s. Meccano was already long past its heyday (it struggles on to this day, in a debased form, but the less said of that the better). Nonetheless it made a very deep impression. I particularly remember one display model in the now defunct Galerias Preciados in Madrid: a 2-foot cube, as I remember it, full of mechanical assemblies and contraptions chugging away to no discernible purpose other than transfixing passing 8-year-olds. But Meccano was expensive and hard to find, and I never had even a fraction of the parts needed to replicate such a marvel. I continually dreamed up gadgets to build and continually ran out of parts a quarter of the way there, and gave up by age 12 or so.

Following an apparently common trajectory, Meccano crossed my mind again 32 years later and I was delighted to discover that it was still going strong as an adult hobby. There are great websites (www.nzmeccano.com, meccanoindex.co.uk), a lively mailing list (Spanner), thriving Meccano clubs in many countries, and impressive yearly exhibitions (Skegex, Magic of Meccano). There is a worldwide community of Meccano fans full of knowledge and eagerness to share it. Not bad for a besotted father's brainwave on a train more than a century ago.

So here we are, the passion burning unabated after two years. It is very hard to describe quite why Meccano gives me such satisfaction. It is little more than bits of metal with holes, and the maker movement has gone far beyond what is possible within the confines of pure Meccano. I'll have to ponder its particular appeal and romance more deeply. But enough for now.