20V AC motors and me!

The E020 motor affectionately known at the Cricket-ball motor

We have a motley collection of motors, all sorts from sideplates to modern geared motors and just about everything else between. I would not profess to have all the minor variations but we are not collecting them, we build with them, or at least that is the idea. 

I have always thought of the Meccano motor as being either under powered, noisy or both. For these reasons all our recent, powered models, have utilised modern motors that are much more efficient and advantageously tend to be much smaller.  This week we bought a modest collection of Meccano and amongst it were a couple of 20V motors. One is a  spherical 'cricket-ball' motor and the other is a 20V long sideplate motor. Having never owned a cricket-ball motor before I thought I would give it a test and see if ran. After a bit of maintenance, and some oil in the correct places, it ran very well. This combined with the fact that I found the original pulley, in the box of Meccano that came with it, has made me reconsider using it in a model. looking for ideas I scanned through our collection of manuals and could find nothing, but the robot in the 1947, No.7-8 manual, model number 8.14. The only other reference can find to it (at the time of writing) is in the Gears manuals - both A and B.  The relevant extract is reproduced below. 

That is one way of making it useful...

I am thinking we will have to just build it into a contemporary model of the time or just build one of our own. It seems that Meccano were not overly keen to promote its sale or did the Second World War curtail its promotion.

Rather tatty but a good runner

Along with the cricket-ball motor there was a rather tatty, red, long sideplate motor. This thing has seen a bit of life, but as with the cricket-ball motor it seemed to be a good runner, after a spot of maintenance. As you can see, I need to locate some spares for it. The reversing plate has the top lug snapped off and the terminal nuts and oilers are missing. It looks like another candidate for building into a model. This time I had no trouble finding ideas there are lots of interesting examples in the manuals covering a long period of time - I feel another crane coming on...

Ralph.