2010 April Exhibition

April 2010
We had another very successful show at Tockington Village Hall in April with a good range of models for us and the public to enjoy and an article in the Bristol Post.

Sam Medworth was into tower cranes and brought a 50s Meccano Magazine Model of the Month example along with a 70s Crane Set version.

John Day had a nicely modelled flat bed truck as well as a windmill.

Terry Child and Mark Bridle are still perfecting their Liebherr diggers and associated dumper trucks. Terry’s was mining pieces of polystyrene for most of the day!

David Worth, despite coming by train with only a relatively small bag still managed to bring a host of small models, mostly modern ones.

Pete Evans also brought a lot of models and outfits for us to enjoy. These included two steam engines, some construction cars and planes, his bouncing marbles machine, an Elektron outfit and a nice 50s No. 9 outfit.

Neil Bedford had several small models along with a beautiful Leyland coach of the 50s and a 30s racing car transporter together with some ERA racing cars.

Ralph Clark’s contribution was a lovely model of a Ravenglass and Eskdale railway locomotive River Esk. This had the rare (unique?) distinction of having a steam powered tender as well as locomotive.

Brian Bowditch showed us a Routemaster Bus which was nicely “exploded” to allow us to see its inner workings.

Richard Smith had made an adapted version of one of David Northcott’s Bugatti models.

Malcolm Hanson went for a late 30s theme with each of the 4 largest outfits of the time together with models that could be built from them.

All the  models can all be seen here on the NZ Meccano website.

The "scrapheap challenge" competition for this year was to build a caber tossing machine! The official "caber" was a section of wooden broom handle cloaked in the insulating foam used on hot water pipes. Apparently, in the real thing, the aim is not to toss the caber as far as possible but to get it to fall at right angles to the “tossing line”. So the suggestion was that we combine the ideas of accuracy and distance as follows:
Your machine could be “powered” by up to 6 tension springs. It was lined up behind a “tossing line” at right angles to the floor-boards of the village hall. Once tossed (and landed) the angle in degrees of the caber to the line of the floor-broads ("angle") was measured together with the distance the caber had gone from the tossing line measured in complete feet ("distance"). A score was then be given as follows:
score = (90 – angle) + distance
The caber should land with the upper end furthest away from the tossing line. The above formula takes this into account by penalising a caber facing the wrong way by giving it an angle greater than 90 deg!

The challenge had only two contestants, Sam and Malcolm. It seems that the idea of a caber tossing machine was a challenge too far! Sam's device won by being the least feeble of the two as in both cases the score on the above formula was negative!

Many thanks to everyone, and especially the Smith family, for making the show so successful.