The Eiffel Tower
Built by Ralph Laughton in October 2010
Meccano has been used to build all sorts of things of the years. Apart from the obvious subjects like cranes and bridges etc., lots of famous landmarks have appeared in various manuals and magazines.
One of the most famous subjects to appear has to be Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s Tower. It was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, a World’s Fair marking the centennial celebration of the French Revolution. It is a giant Meccano-like structure built by 300 workers from 10,038 pieces and 2½ million rivets!
The model stands over 7’ tall and is built following the 1938 № 10 set manual instructions. We have made a few modifications by using single long parts where the instructions indicate to use several shorter parts due to the limited number of parts supplied in the set.
It is not a faithful reproduction of the original as the manual designers have used creative licence, but it is instantly recognisable. This was, and still is, the magic of Meccano, being able to create recognisable objects from a selection of standard parts. The same parts can be used over and over again (as ours will be) to build a varied selection of models.
The model is built from zinc-plated and red painted parts and only took about 20 hours to build, the original 1938 model would have been built from the gold and blue painted parts of the day.