 Back
to Home |
Back
to Magazine |
Zen and the Art of Meccano Modelling
by Simon Johnson.
My daughter ate a bowl of spinach yesterday. This was unusual, as she hates spinach. What was stranger was the untouched sweet corn cob on the next shelf of the refrigerator, a vegetable Susie has always seen as a treat.
“The spinach was cooked,” she said.
“So?”
“The sweet corn needed boiling.”
I teased her about this – typical lazy teenager, etc. – until I remembered the Blocksetting Crane in the hall cupboard. How long had it taken to finish? Five, six years?
Nowadays everything has to happen instantly. We grind our teeth if the computer takes its time logging on, eat fast food and fill our houses with labour saving devices. The slightest delays are enough to bring on road rage, queue rage and even supermarket rage. Our children tap instant, unintelligible messages to each other on their cell phones and build things out of Lego.
A few years ago I decided to sidestep all this. I’d take up Meccano again. I remembered how complex models took weeks, even months to complete, how time didn’t matter when you were trying to make a gearbox run freely or design a decent brake for the winding drum of a crane. It was like Zen – instead of chasing your own tail, you stayed focused on the here and now.
Things began well. I built the pre-war Supermodel Baltic tank Locomotive and a couple of steam engines. My blood pressure went down. In Christmas 1998 I began the steam-driven Table Top Blocksetter illustrated in the January 1975 Meccano Magazine Quarterly. The model is a modern classic. It incorporates a compact gearbox which provides forward and reverse on all drives and a captive roller bearing turntable that is the best in the business. It is a very well designed model with few traps and by the end of the holiday I had completed both the tower and the boom. I don’t have a serviceable steam engine so I powered the crane with an E20R slung beneath the cab with a drive to a dummy steam engine above. In the following weekends I completed the gearbox and hooked up the slewing and travelling drives. The captive roller bearing turntable allows the drive to the bogies to pass through the turntable with no friction whatsoever, a big advantage over conventional Meccano turntables in which the drive rod holds the model together.
With the crane able to travel along it’s rails at a majestic three inches per minute I let things slide. 1998 came to an end and we spent Christmas with the in-laws. 1999 was not a good year – threats of impending computer meltdown and all that – and 2000 wasn’t much better. Every once in a while I’d wheel out the crane, fire up the E20R with a reek of burning dust then tell myself that I ought to be gardening or cleaning out the basement. After all, the model was virtually finished.
Christmas 2003. I noticed that the little rubber bands I had fitted to the 1/2” Pulleys forming the bogie wheels had perished. I’d used them to improve adhesion – originally they were from the braces on my daughter’s teeth. Susie hadn’t worn braces since the fourth form. Next year – 2004 – she’d be at university
Shame kick-started me into completing the crane. The roller bearing had become a little sloppy so I pulled it apart and played with the packing washers. By the time the model was finished I’d remembered why I’d started it in the first place. Surrounded by pressures of our own making, there’s a lot to be said for spending the weekend adjusting a turntable, adding and subtracting electrical washers until the whole thing runs true.
Editor’s note: Simon Johnson is currently working on the Modelplan 86 Single Deck Bus. He hopes to complete it by the end of the decade.