Engineering for.... Just Boys?

 

After last night's brief reflection on inspiration, or the lack of it, I got the idea for tonight's little scribble from messing around with something in the studio earlier today, involving Meccano. I was just mocking up a mechanism to better visualise whether it would suit my purpose - which it didn't, and I should have known better - with some old Meccano parts that I've got lying around the place. These bits came from the clearance of Aunt Lou's place [blog posts passim] and almost certainly belonged to her late son, David, who died in his forties. Now, this led me to reflect on my Meccano set, which Dad gave to me in around 1959 or 60, when I was around five or six years old. I'd got it into my head over the years that the set I had was a number five, but seeing some images of old catalogues online, I realised that it must have been at the very least a number eight set, as, in the illustration above, from a Meccano magazine of the time. The tower crane featured here was one of the models that Dad made for me as soon as he got the set home, when I was off school ill with one of the childhood illnesses - I can't remember which - we were only too familiar with in those days. This was a piece that could only have been made with a number eight set, which would have cost £9-15s at the time, or £9.75 in today's money, which at the time would have been about two weeks wages for the old man. Oh, and by the way, the bloke in the illustration bears an uncanny resemblance to my Dad at the time, except we didn't look quite as middle-class as those two...