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.