April 2023 Meeting
Report from our Summer 2023 Newsletter
Saturday 1 April 2023
Falconwood Community Centre
Falconwood
This was one of our informal quarterly meetings where our members showed off their latest Meccano creations.
At around 2:00pm we had a short committee meeting, followed by the Model Tour in which members were invited to give a short talk about their models — in particular their entries for the Secretary’s Challenge!
At around 3:30pm Alan Wenbourne gave a talk on The Design of Gears for Production covering his experience in designing automotive gears and gearboxes. It introduced simple involute gear geometry, how a gear tooth is loaded, how the bending and compressive stresses are derived, typical grades of steel and heat treatments used, fracture and fatigue stress analysis and gear/gearbox life evaluation.
The Page 15 Models Secretary’s Challenge
The idea for this Challenge was borrowed from the Wellington Meccano Club in New Zealand who, in turn, had taken the idea from their countrymen in the MWT club.
The Challenge was to build a model from page 15 of any instruction manual. If there was more than one model on the page, then our members could choose which one to build — or build all of them!