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23rd March 2010 Sue's gone shopping...

Completed trolley with load onboard

Now, you know how you blokes like a nice crane or as Ralph wanted to build a container carrier, well, it was time for me to show you how it should be done…

Our local club (SELMEC) set a secretary's challenge for each meeting. The challenge for the spring meeting was to think of your least used part and then to make a model using four of them. Our least used part has to be part 19c (you know, the 6 inch pulley) but we only have two of those. Likewise part 167 but we only have two of those (hers and his)!  After a bit of head scratching we decided to go for the Stepped Bent Strip (part 44). Ralph worked out that they would make a castoring wheel and was intending to make something really boring so I stepped in and put him straight.

What has castors? A shopping trolley! OK maybe not the first thing to spring to mind but you have to agree it’s different. A search on the Internet turned up all sorts of pictures of shopping trolleys.

The model
After a couple of false starts I was away, strips all over the place, poor old Ralph was banished from the Meccano table. This was never going to be a scale model, after all I was using strips and the real things are all wire-work. If I could make something that looked the part I would be happy.  The big problem was getting the strips to graduate evenly. A bit of fiddling about and I worked out the top of the vertical strips could be sandwiched between a pair of strips and they did not all need to be bolted in place. A few red bits added the final touch to the model and gave it an identity, Iceland maybe. The wheeled frame is made up from doubled up angle girders, to which the castor wheels were attached.

Work in progress

All I needed to do now was take it for a test drive and that I did, finding a selection of the new Nano kits – all six of them.

The interesting thing is that the model ‘drives’ just like the real thing – badly! The guys at SELMEC also took it for a test drive and concurred that the feel was very realistic. I have been paid not to publish incriminating evidence in case I get them in trouble with their better halves.

The trolley has a crash-flap for easy parking when finished with

Sue.

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