World’s last dedicated Meccano factory to close in France
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Everything is absolutely delightful. The parts are great quality. The boxes are amazing. And the manuals… wow. They’re basically engineering text book excerpts.
Apologies, I don’t know how to get it as one album:
https://ibb.co/qphSfC3 https://ibb.co/B6PGFDs https://ibb.co/wWrn9Rw https://ibb.co/5Tk8RPr https://ibb.co/dJJtYSZ https://ibb.co/Tq6wXyx https://ibb.co/4WVSgPR https://ibb.co/FK9spg7 https://ibb.co/0GKc5Qb https://ibb.co/jHRMSXW https://ibb.co/VMmT8DB
The Czech version of the page says Frank Hornby patented the metal construction set in 1901. Merkur started just before the patent expired, long before the Cold War.
Serious question though, since these are from the 60s and 70s... any concerns about lead paint?
(the green and red painted parts don’t exist in any of the sets we have. I bet you those do have lead.)
Every time I go into a shop looking for Lego, I no longer see many generic sets: castles, pirate ships, cars, trucks, but they're all big name IP licenses: Pirates of the Caribbean ships, Harry Potter castles, Volvo Trucks, Range Rover SUVs, McLaren cars, BMW motorcycles, etc.
Now they're all just fancy collectables meant to sit on display instead of being generic sets where you had to use your imagination to make what you want it to be: that generic looking car could be a McLaren, could be a Ferrari, could be whatever you wanted it to be. Then take it apart and mix it with the rest of your sets to create something original.
And the IP licensing is reflected in the price for the sets. I wouldn't be surprised if many of Lego's customers are just nostalgic grown men with disposable income, instead of curious kids.
Me thinks Meccano should have taken the same path if they wanted to survive but I'm not an executive in the toy industry to know for sure.
When I was a kid, I didn't treat the licensed sets as "special collectibles." I had Ferrari/Bionicle/etc sets, and all of that stuff got mixed into the same bin eventually (except one of the Ferraris, which I still have to this day). Not sure why a kid would treat any given branded set differently because of the branding, I kept the Ferrari because I like it.
Sidebar: a standard measure in the Lego community is "price per piece," and the licensed sets do tend to be more costly. That's not a hard-and-fast truth, though. This blog has a great breakdown from a couple years ago: https://brickbucks.net/what-is-lego-price-per-piece/
That's fine, you do you, AFOLs - but the way we played with Lego was we'd get a new set, build it, play with it in that form for a while, and then eventually, it got taken apart for some new idea and thrown into the bin.
There are 2 or 3 30 gallon tubs at my parent's house still filled with Lego, it must be the collected output of at least 100 different sets that were given to us for birthdays, Christmas, and also bought by us when we were old enough to have our own money and young enough to spend it on Lego. We had an air hockey table in the basement that was almost always covered with a landscape of fortresses, spaceships, and weird Bionicle monsters. Good times.
Lego CAD software is really good nowadays, too. I was able to design my own flower pot for my girlfriend's Lego Botanicals flowers. I was able to order all the pieces directly from Lego, which is pretty convenient.
Well, the “18+” labeling is a dead giveaway.
That age warning on Lego is more useless than on porn sites.
Well, that and the astronomical price tags on some of the sets.
That said, over the years, creating new stuff from existing sets became harder and harder, I find this a pity.
They've figured out that you sell more Lego with a story behind it.
Does it change much? I don't know, there's still a lot of cool builds.
The Friends Lego set seems to be in line with their investment in adult demographics, in the sense of being product lines that are decorative show pieces instead of play things.
What? The Friends sets are specifically designed to be for use as objects in play, and this is pretty obvious from looking at them (multiple disconnected builds per set, role-play focused themes, character designs). They're weak as decorative pieces compared to even the Creator line, let alone e.g the Architecture or Icon lines which are specifically designed for that.
https://www.lego.com/de-de/product/street-food-market-41701
Does that scream "adult desk toy" to you?
Very many interesting sets, and some are now in stores (saw the Lego Office set at a Walmart, can’t wait for that to clearance and I’ll grab it root sweet)
Lego Friends is also the name for a theme built in-house and designed to appeal to girls (though the sets are not overly ‘pink’ if you will, and quite well designed as a “city”) by replacing the mini figs with mini dolls that are more realistically proportioned. It has been very successful and arguably has replaced much of Lego City (the boys I know have no problem mixing mini figs and mini dolls, the girls prefer to keep to the mini dolls).
Ah Icons is Creator Expert.
Interesting fact: the various “lines” have developmental budget they can “spend” internally on design and parts and such - so a rebrand may indicate that the CE team now has more budget.
Think a piece that exists costs 1, needing a new color of an existing piece costs 5, and you only have budget for one or two entirely new pieces a year.
Point was that both Ninjago and Lego Friends are produced by Lego themselves, mimicking IP like Harry Potter and Marvel that they also make Lego of.
I think the biggest threat to the generic lines is the fact that they have to compete against other generic stuff that's produced cheaper. So they need to differentiate. Amazon is filled to the brim with the no-name generic building blocks that are not as high quality as Lego, and apparently you can't differentiate purely base don the quality alone.
Even in clothing, there are less and less, not high-fashion but high quality for not totally unreasonable price brands.
I'd say the biggest threat is Lego's pricing. Even Lego's small generic sets are sold for over 20€. Even Lego fans pause when faced with that kind of price tags.
He has three sets of his own (gotten at 3¾ and his fourth birthday), and has now progressed from building the sets (the 5+ Lego City generic stuff) to disassembling them and building his own things.
The non-diehard fans can simply buy Lego knockoffs.
I'd like to support Lego but I don't get to do that by buying used sets or knockoffs, but Lego's pricing also prices me out of the market.
In my opinion, the strategy of quality-first is the main reason for lego's sustainable success.
Inflation considered, and set size, Lego has gone down in price since I was a kid, and generic sets (Creator) are still available.
What’s also amazing is the “licensed premium” isn’t that high if you do direct comparisons.
They did perfect low quantity manufacturing which is evident by the vast numbers of obvious for-adults “Ideas” that are produced.
That sounds like an issue with the stores you go to. Even in big department stores I see generic Lego sets (City, Technic, Duplo, etc) next to licensed ones.
The licenses obviously don’t cost a ton as the price per piece on the Duplo is comparable to other “sets” - the “big box of parts” is cheaper as always, but I wonder how much of that is “we out left over pieces and spend no design time”.
Lego has more cash and clout to get more desirable IPs with less strict restrictions of course.
I think the real reason for the decline of Meccano/Erector is that it is more fiddly than Lego is. I almost wrote difficult but I don't think that's quite the right word -- there is a lot more freedom in construction with makes assembly, even following instructions, trickier.
Meccano/Erector (or the Czech Merkur) are all metal, die cut/stamped out of sheet metal and using actual screws. Moreover, the French factory being closed was practically hand-making it, it was not at all automated. So as economically inefficient and expensive as it gets.
Also these types of construction sets just aren't as amenable to the usual licensed IP - you can't really make Batman or Star Wars figurines out of sheet metal. These sets don't really have a history of mixing a lot of plastic parts with the usual metal bits. It doesn't work well together and also the result looks a bit weird with all those holes. In addition, the types of shapes you can make out of it are more limited due to the way it is manufactured (or it would get very expensive if custom bent/shaped parts were required). Whereas for Lego it is just another mold being used so they have a lot more flexibility.
Meccano/Erector or Merkur are really most suitable for what they were originally modeled after and designed for - mechanical machines, engines, contraptions, etc. Lot of real-world machines were prototyped with Merkur - e.g. the first contact lenses were made by their inventor using a Merkur machine.
Sadly those types of toys are not as much in vogue today - or need to be full of flashy electronics, connected to a phone and ideally licensed from Disney to be able to sell them ...
Doing anything new is very hard without advanced tech. You still need fundamentals, but those are really hard to market, because from the outside it just looks like "All relevant modern engineering is done with computers and that's the most important part", the non-computer parts kind of blend into the background.
Maybe someone should do a book celebrating the few low tech cool things people are doing. There's probably still undiscovered possibilities with mechanical stuff!
Multiple commenters in this thread wrote of unexpectedly plastic Meccano sets they purchased in the last few years (and the problems involved).
Even Kinder Surprise toys are now just QR-coded pointers to app.
They've released some really nice non-IP sets in the last few years - Titanic, Saturn V, the various modular buildings, the Colloseem... of course these are the big adult-oriented sets that cost several hundred dollars.
Star Wars Toy Commercial - SNL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYyuo7gm-aQ
I hope those things never go away.
(I remember some IQ-like test as a youth that showed I was off the charts in "Spatial Reasoning" — no doubt helped by my constant manipulation of construction blocks/tpys.)
It was also a specific type of Morrocans: Those who strived enough at school to emigrate to France, compared to a specific type of French students, those who succeed in engineering.
To this day, it’s still a mystery to me why a specific group could be so markedly different in only one subject matter. Could it be that Morrocans who succeeded had had no time in their childhood to play spatially? My favorite theory is they didn’t have as much Lego in Morrocco as we (at least future engineers) had in France.
A possibility is that aphants have an advantage in abstract thought so they are the top percentile in maths. If the 96th percentile (in standardized tests of maths) of Moroccans studied at your school instead of the 99th, I would expect them to be better at drawing.
Those classes introduced 3d modeling for me ( in the 90s, on paper, without computer )
That was not a important class, but you were left knowing how to draw and read a 3d shape in several 2d views
They probably had to study Ebglish too.
People often forget how long it takes to learn another language.
Basically a LEGO brick is expensive because when being fabbed it is part of a relatively small volume (single color) injection run with limited parallelism, has to be 'manually' handled to be retrieved and packed, and then is effectively a large block of air requiring inefficient shipping, storage and retail presentation around the world. Changing the injection machine out to a new material means down time. Changing the mould takes even more time. Every SKU needs new retail packaging design, documentation and assets. Direct to consumer retail leaves scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "unique IP".
Whereas an MCU is tiny, can be fabbed in hugely parallel process, is designed to be packaged and distributed in a space efficient tape which remains trivial to consume en-masse owing to its automation-friendliness. Industrial sales leave little scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "functionality and reliability as supply chain component at competitive price point".
I can buy chinese made lego sets that cost £15. An official set would be hundreds or thousands. It’s the same pieces.
Although you might ask, should be accept a slightly lower tolerance to drive down the cost?
And it’s hard to compare Lego bricks and semiconductors. Lego is not that hard, they only use special, a bit more expensive injection molding machines with pressure sensors. While even cheapest Padauk chip needs very very expensive foundry.
Feels like planned obsolescense marketed under the guise of ecology.
I wouldn't say that. My take is that producing small metalic pieces is such a trivial task nowadays that it makes far more sense to subcontract this instead of maintaining a full blown factory.
I know people in aerospace that can order custom pieces with tight tolerances in whatever alloy they choose, choose the production method and treatments, and get those pieces delivered to their doorstep in a matter of days.
A Meccano set doesn't even come near regarding demand and tolerances, and I'm sure that it can be as expensive to assemble as plain old nails, and requiring far less specialized equipment.
Merkur is about as old as Meccano and Erector and boys from the former Eastern Bloc are most likely very familiar with it.
By late 1961 Wichterle succeeded in producing the first four hydrogel contact lenses on a home-made apparatus built using a children's building kit (Merkur), a bicycle dynamo belonging to one of his sons, and a bell transformer. Wichterle also made all the moulds and glass tubing needed to dose them with monomer. On Christmas afternoon, with the help of his wife Linda, using the machine on his kitchen table, Wichterle finally succeeded. He tried the lenses in his own eyes and although they were the wrong power they were comfortable. Thus, he invented a new way of manufacturing the lenses using a centrifugal casting procedure. A few days later, he completed his patent application and produced over 100 lenses by spin casting. He built several new prototype machines using Merkur toys with increasing numbers of spindles which required the stronger motor taken from his gramophone. With these rudimentary devices, in the first four months of 1962, Wichterle and Linda made 5,500 lenses.
Also, yes, the instructions for their building ideas were crap by comparison with Lego's.
I'm 100% certain it was a legitimate Meccano set, as we bought it at a brick and mortar toy store, not Amazon.
We stuck to Lego after that.
https://english.radio.cz/merkur-czech-toy-which-you-can-buil...
I was only a bit jealous as I had a "rival toy" which offered more possibilities: it was 2 round parts with a thin part in the middle. It offered shear tolerance in this thin part, so you have complex fractal like shapes in a X-Y plane by gently bending it to go from 2 to 3 hooks.
You could also grow these shapes in the Z plane by embedding the thin part of other pieces inbetween the round parts, snapping it into place.
I can't remember the name ATM, but here's a picture: http://www.filipiknow.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Pinoy-L...
Meccano (and Merkur) use proper fasteners. So, you're learning useful life skills with the fiddly bits.
But that also means the joins are much stronger, so you can build working machines that can handle real loads in Meccano.
Meta-but: when you do this, you discover that the thin metal plates are not strong. So, you need to learn to build box section structures and so on, which in itself is a real-life engineering skill which can help if you later go on to building structures from real-world materials such as metal tubing, wood, bamboo, etc.
So yes, the fiddliness is a pain, but it's an educational pain that leads to more learning...
Until you end up with the skills to build multi-meters-tall objects and working machinery.
Whereas Lego doesn't scale up well. Even large Lego sculptures, which are mostly static and unmoving, not machines, must be glued together. But that means you have to do un-glued test builds, get it right, then tear it down and repeat the entire process but with adhesives.
Above fairly trivial level, what Lego teaches is bad practices and bad engineering. Which is not a criticism of Lego! It's a toy and meant to be one, and it's a great one. But building complex machines is not what it was meant for -- whereas that's exactly what Meccano is good for.
Me constructing cross-bows from Meccano like (Merkur) as kid: >.>
Original Lego becomes available right after USSR crash (it was very expensive for 1990s in newborn Russia, but it pas present in several posh toy shops), and Meccano never appears in Russia and Soviet knock-off sets were forgotten.
Only many years later (when Lego was very well-known already for years) I've learned about Meccano.
Looks like Lego has much more competent marketing & distribution department.
That’s changed now, but it would have been much easier to knockoff low tolerance metal pieces in the 70-90s
But I'm talking more about marketing: post-USSR countries were ready to Meccano (because parents had played with Meccano clones, not Lego clones), but Lego won, and almost nobody knows about Meccano,
Going to the toy store to fetch the yearly Lego catalogue was a cherished ritual for me. I would study it thoroughly and think of how to spend my yearly budget most wisely.
There are other things such as:
still waiting to see what will stick in the market.
Lego technic is a better toy.
>I’ve come up with a theory connecting three big zeitgeist things: the end of the zero-interest world, the ongoing AI panic, and the meaning crisis. I think it also connects all three to the climate crisis, but I’ll leave that topic aside for this essay since it’s too big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv-PdL47YZ0
James May, of Top Gear fame, walking across a mechano bridge.
Like everything it had its soviet knockoff - colored communist dark red and naturally somewhat larger, so it wasn't compatible, but had one feature I never saw in the western counterpart: an "engine" with a functioning flywheel.