Meccano Engineers

I watched the repeat of James May's Top Toys on BBC2 on Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Apart from the fact that he had come up with exactly the same design for a Lancaster bomber as my brother Frank and I used to make with Lego and had the cheek to claim it as his own, I have to agree with him that today's toys, including those still around from 40 years ago like Lego and Meccano, are absolute rubbish.

When we used to play with those building toys you had a pile of bits, either metal rods, bars, nuts and bolts, or square and rectangular bricks and then you used your imagination to build something.

These days Lego kits and Meccano kits all contain specially shaped pieces designed to build just the one particular model that is shown on the box. Since the 1980s we have been breeding generations who have never needed to use their imagination and, as a consequence, many people don't have one.

Whilst I was looking for the photos to accompany the last blog entry on Austria, I found these photos from a visit to a modelling exhibition in Fleetwood in 2000.

The chap who built that marvellous model of a steam engine in Meccano didn't do it from a set of instructions I'm sure.

And there was this ingenious device. Hardly a work of art in itself, but this complicated set-up of cogs, chains and pulleys was turning out works of art like the one shown below.

Rigged up to a turntable, the device had a pen holder in the shape of a drum with a hole in it that you could drop a ballpoint refill down and it then drew the pen back and forth whilst the turntable revolved slowly. The other bits and pieces varied the length of the stroke to come up with all the intricate geometric designs that later generations would create using Spirograph.

Many towns have a modelling society and many of them have an annual exhibition. They are well worth going to have a look at if you get the chance.

I'm sure I saw something in the paper the other day about another one in Fleetwood... What, Fran? Oh... I'm supposed to be tiling the kitchen...?

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Bildit

Quite some time ago I made a couple of entries on the blog about building toys.

One was about Meccano which is just about still going (but not particularly as I remember it) and the other described Bayko which was the building toy before Lego came on the scene.

There was a third toy I have fond memories of but for the life of me I couldn't remember its name or find any photos of it on the Internet. It had yellow rods that you could connect by using red plastic wheels - it was great for building cubes, cars, aeroplanes etc.

But it's strange how things work out in this world and I got a message from a work colleague, Dave Webster, who works at Sunderland after he had seen my photographs at Flickr and after having a look through his own photos I came across this one which I've cropped drastically above but which shows him as a young lad at school with that self same toy which I now know was called Bildit and on seeing the photo I immediately recognised the tube it came in.

Many thanks for filling that gap in my memories Dave!

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Meccano Memories

When I was a nipper this was the must have expensive toy.

Most of the Meccano bits we had were originally my Uncle David's, though Mum and Dad added to it from time to time.

My best memories of it are not so much making models from it but using some of the angled pieces resting on piles of books to create marble runs. Where you put a marble at the top and it ran along the bits of Meccano, down allyways made from more books and onto other bits of Meccano.

Why did I not take any photos of those??? Probably because I was too busy playing with them!

Look at how the lad in the advert is dressed too. We did wear shirts, ties, pullovers and sometimes blazers too in the house. There was no central heating, only coal fires and until they got going and had been going for some time it was cold in winter!

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