Meccano Pile Driver
| Meccano and toy steam engines just naturally go together, in fact the power plant running this pile driver was actually sold by Meccano. It is a model MEC1 manufactured by Mamod with Meccano decals. This type of unit with the horizontal boiler is one of the last styles of steam engines sold by Meccano, the original steam plants featured a vertical boiler and are now considered collectors items bringing very hefty prices when put on the auction block. |
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It all started as I listened to the rythymic thumping of a pile driver a couple miles away while having my morning coffee last summer, I just never had a chance to get to it until I was snowed in a couple days ago.
I started with the derrick, once I had it put together and working smoothly I then set about to make a mechanism for the trip action.
After trying a couple different methods I settled on a cam to raise the drive gear for the winding drum.
The gearing was trial and error, luckily I had a pretty good assortment of sprockets.
Fastening the string to the winding drum took a bit of fiddling, it has to be timed just right, I used duct tape to stick it in position. Video of Pile Driver in Action
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