Who needs Evolution?

Following on from my post on Saturday, regarding the alternative model from the Evolution crane set HERE, Auckland Meccano guild's Les Megget contacted me to let me know he had build a real model of the box art crane, using non-Evolution series parts, similar to the VirtualMec model I published by Edmundo Veiga. Les writes " I made this from the Meccano website instructions before my evolution set arrived (early October).  Note that my version luffs to about twice the angle of Meccano's [Evolution] version."

Les Megget's clever non-Evolution crane truck

The crane truck built from the Evolution set does have a few problems, mainly with the instructions, but there are some building issues too that have been well documented here and generally around the Meccano on-line community. Now we have the Evolution set, maybe a fusion model using both traditional and Evolution parts would be an interesting proposition.

Copycat!

New Multimodel10 set dumper

We amused ourselves recently when Meccano announced the impending release of the new Multimodel 10 model set. We showed a model of a dumper truck. A nice looking model that we felt was a vast improvement over some of its predecessors.
Tony James wrote to us amused to see that he had produced a model of that dumper truck from the iconic original No.10 set and produced a model plan of the same. We made light of this and tongue-in-cheek suggested that Meccano had been looking at the Model Plan publications as inspiration, HERE.

looks familiar...

Once might be amusing but twice? Time to get the our people to talk to the your people, Mr. Meccano!

Yesterday, Tony contacted us again to point out that the alternative model from the Evolution Crane set has a strong resemblance to his Model Plan MP 159! Of course we immediately dismissed that as pure speculation as we only had his word for these allegations. Our reluctance to conceded that Meccano were indeed copying his work was squashed on receipt of the photographic evidence he sent to us.  The multiple image, supplied as evidence by Tony, can be seen to the left. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

As you can see, Tony was making models of  recovery trucks long before the evolution models were even a twinkling in the eye of the designers at Meccano. We are now wondering when Meccano will be making the yellow version of Postman Pat's van to go with their model. In his e-mail to us here at Laughton Towers, Tony says "I won't mention the telescopic jib crane etc."  So we won't either!

If you would like to see what Meccano will be producing over the coming years a full range of Tony's plans are available from MW Mail Order

Note to 'Your people'...

We are only joking... aren't we?

Ralph