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!
The Walking Models Secretary’s Challenge
This challenge was to build a ‘walking’ model — not so easy!
There have, however, been quite a number of walking models published, including an impressive-looking â„– 8 set model in the 1950 manual (an earlier version is also in a pre-war manual) and various models by Andreas Konkoly, including a Centipede, one version of which is powered by a Magic Motor.
There have also been attempts at some ‘serious’ walkers — I remember a 4-legged machine in the Meccanoman’s Newsmag and a 2-legged one in a recent Constructor Quarterly.
Then there are the Meccanoids — nice models, but Bert Love was very critical of them. He thought that the gearing was wrong and that the feet were badly designed. He wrote an article on them — was it in an early Constructor Quarterly? — showing one of them rebuilt.
Our Secretary suspected that the problem with a Walking Machine will be setting it up.