You are probably wondering who I am, so here is a short description about me.
Now living with my dear wife Sally in the far south west of Cornwall near St. Just in Penrith on what we call the rough side as we take the full brunt of the weather from the Atlantic.
I became a Design Engineer in the early seventies in storage design and then moved into contracting. So over the last forty years I was working mainly in the South and South West on design work in the Petrochemical Industry on land and at sea.
I have also worked in Aircraft on the A30 and the Boeing 757 in the USA.
My last port of call was Bristol where I worked for Strachan and Henshaw on mechanical handling equipment in Power Stations, Submarines and Surface Ships.
So you can see where my interest comes from in modelling with Meccano.
I retired from engineering around 2005 and moved to Cornwall and I am now a professional Artist and have been doing fairly well at this subject.
I have been collecting Meccano for the past 30 years and have quite collection of old and new in various states of finish.
Just recently I have been refurbishing, mainly stripping the old scratched and rusty bits down to the bare metal and now looking at protecting it with different finishes. The only problem with living here is the atmosphere; it is very salty so surface rust moves in fairly quickly.
Ok that's the boring bit over with.
During the “Lockdown” I thought that I would take on some serious modelling so I wanted to find a structure that hadn’t been modelled before. I found this old Block - Setting Titan Crane, designed by Stothert and Pitt of Bath, for Table Bay in New Zealand.
And these two pictures are all I have to work on, I have searched the Net far and wide and the only other source that I have found - to my sort of disappointment - is that a chap from the NZ Meccano Club produced a model a while ago.
It is quite a strange looking crane and has been very challenging to model so having some engineering background helps.
Here are a few pictures of the progress so far.
As you can see it is in its very early stages of modelling and I am by no means a perfectionist. I just enjoy the engineering challenge.
When I get what you call an 'Artist’s Block’ it gives my mind something totally different to think about.