When I recently visited my dad with 4yo and 6yo, he pulled out three “Meccano” sets, mainly in German, from the 1960s or maybe 70s.
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:
These aren't Meccano, they are East German "Construction" sets. A riff on the Meccano idea, but metric, and probably not paying license fees to Meccano at the time ;-) The parts will look great quality while played with only a little, but the plating has a habit of coming off in small sharp flakes if you ever bend them.
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.
Thanks for the information! These were given to my dad in the 90s by a colleague at Environment Canada. Now I’m curious how they got here from East Germany.
Shame. IIRC the same thing would have happened to Lego if they wouldn't have had branched out into collectables and IP licensing. They were on a steep decline in the '00s and then launched the Bionicle line for kids to collect then started licensing IPs.
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.
It's no secret that Lego is marketing to adults. The botanicals sets are explicitly designed for people who want to decorate their home. Many of the "creator expert" sets show adults building the sets in the ad material.
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/
Yeah, I've always found the trend with adult Lego fans to be a bit funny - buy the set, build it, and put it on a shelf somewhere.
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.
I bought a lego set during the pandemic to keep myself occupied, but that was a one-and-done thing. A couple months ago, I bought another Lego set- an enormous 2900 piece jazz club. I still don't know where I'm actually going to put it, but it sits on my desk for now and it's fun to fiddle around with. In short, it rekindled my childhood love for Lego.
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.
That's pretty much it. The only original Lego stuff left is the city stuff. Even new lines within the Lego world is done as if it's licensed: Ninjago is it's own TV series. Friends also has a TV series.
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.
> 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.
It’s a Lego “Ideas” set which is where fans build example sets, other fans vote on them, Lego examines them, determines if they can get the license if needed, and then rebuilds them for production.
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).
No, this is an Icons / "Creator Expert" set. The Central Perk set was an Ideas set (and I did see that in stores here), but nobody called that "the Friends set" because it's confusing.
This is all complex and confusing heh. I know there have been some ideas sets that were popular enough to have a few more “in the line” but icons is new to me.
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.
Regarding Lego, as long as that IP stuff allows them to keep producing the excellent generic stuff (which is still easy to buy online, less so in stores, at least in Germany), more power to them!
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 think the biggest threat to the generic lines is the fact that they have to compete against other generic stuff that's produced cheaper.
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.
Fortunately, hundreds of billions of Lego bricks were sold over the years, many of which survive, making for a very deep secondary market. On average, families only seem to grow wealthier, in terms of the amount of Lego they acquire.
As evidenced by my four year old who is eagerly anticipating the day my childhood boxes of Lego will come to him (as they will later this year; being the only grandchild). He is already very happily playing with them over at his grandparents house of course.
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.
It benefits die hard fans, including the kind that's not tall enough to ride a rollercoaster, because they're routinely gifted Lego by the bucket. I think an argument could be made that there is enough Lego in rotation that we can stop making more of it for a couple of decades.
From evidence not directly stated they bought it more to keep it alive than to make millions. Bricklink is a value add; what other toy can you get spare parts for sets 30+ years old even on the secondary market?
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.
I an happy that Lego Pick a Brick exists. Sure, it costs small fortune, but if you are interested only in building parts collection for experimentation, eg. you need 20 black beams of every type and bricklink has no people selling in your region.
> Every time I went into a shop looking for Lego, I no longer see many generic Lego sets
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.
Half the Duplo and Technic are now licensed, but I suspect the Technic licenses may be nearly free or even paid to Lego - they’re selling Ford cars to Ford fans.
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”.
Meccano tried licensed IP: Gears of War, Rabbids, Tin Tin, Sonic. Possibly others I don't remember.
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.
It is also a lot more expensive to produce. Lego is just injection molded ABS plastic.
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 ...
I can think of a total of 2 interesting and novel mechanical inventions in modern times, both only relevant outside of cities, and one I believe is based on some traditional practices(The firewood splitter from New Zealand, and the water storage artificial glacier towers).
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!
I've thought, that Lego doesn't make basic generic stuff anymore, but the I found youtube channel "Brickcrafts" where one Austrian guy build amazing Lego city. He buys generic stuff by tons no problem.
They were fantastic. There was some kind of marketing event at a shopping mall in upstate NY when I was young. Construx were brand new, and to my utter shock my parents bought some for me. It felt very out of character for my parents to buy toys like this, but they picked a winner in doing so.
The selection of sets at retail tends to be a bit biased.
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.
We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust. That is too bad. From Tinker Toys to Lincoln Logs to Lego to Erector — even a weird 70's toy, the Hasbro Astrolite, my childhood was filled with construction toys. Engineering, thinking in 3 dimensions, creativity, mechanical movements, "sculpting", re-playability were all there.
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.)
In my excellent engineering school in France, one group reliably had very bad marks at technical drawings, the Morrocans. It required seeing the pieces in 3D based on flat drawings. It’s not IQ since they all went on to have great careers, and most performed excellently in calculus or language.
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.
This probably isn't the reason but people who spend more time in nature have less spatial intuition about artificial things like 90 degree angles and perfect circles.
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.
It's kind of odd that a small microcontroller IC costs less than a LEGO brick. As if injection molding is a more expensive process than semiconductor fabbing.
Reasons include automation cycle time and base process parallelism, warehousing cost, shipping cost, distribution cost, manner of use.
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".
A bunch of manufacturers are nowadays equal to Lego quality (and beat them in other qualities, e.g. recently Lego really seems to struggle with color consistency). Not always easy to find out what a certain set manufacturer uses (they often buy the bricks from someone else), but e. g. Gobricks (afaik used by Panlos) and whatever Bluebricks Pro uses are really good.
My kids got a few MEGA Bloks sets when they were younger, and 1/1000 is an incredibly generous description of their tolerances. Things just... didn't stick together consistently. They'd just fall apart.
No. Lego is expensive, because it’s luxury toy brand. There many many guys analyzing this topic, here is one of them: https://bricknerd.com/home/greed-or-inflation-an-economic-an... Long story short: each year new sets contain less parts AND cost more.
The piece you cite does not support your conclusion; it is an analysis of Lego’s price increases on existing sets, and concludes that they are, in fact, inflation-driven. The only thing it says relevant to your conclusion is mostly dismissive of it as viable for Lego, though indicating its outside the scope of the article (quote: Another way around this is “Shrinkflation” where companies provide slightly smaller goods at the same price as before in an attempt to disguise the price increase, though when LEGO fans closely judge sets by size and piece count, this is harder to pull off. That’s an article for another day.)
I found very good metric somewhere: part count in all of the season sets vs. price. I don’t remember where, but there was writing, that while part count was decreasing, price increasing. And the best deal was too look for ~decade old used sets. They were bigger and feature rich. But I am not into buying anymore, I have hundreds pounds of it from last 3 decades.
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.
> We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust.
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.
Maybe 3d printing will inherit this. Even though it won't probably feel the same. Simple mechanical toys vs 3d printed electromechanical drones .. not exactly similar.
I'm not surprised (albeit slightly saddened) - I bought my 6 year old boy the set pictured and the quality it terrible - it's plastic and the tolerances are so bad the nuts can never be done up to any tightness before slipping. The instructions were also akin to a crappy toy you'd buy off AliExpress.
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.
I loved Meccano as a boy, and bought some for my son last Christmas - what a huge disappointment! As you said, it's plastic now instead of metal, and not even good quality plastic. It flexes too much, and soon showed white stress marks. Difficult or impossible to tighten things properly, one piece comes loose as you're tightening another.
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.
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.
That's really cool. The reason all these Meccano-like sets never took off is that they're so fiddly. Unlike Lego you don't just need the beams and your fingers, you need screws, washers and screwdrivers. Taking them apart then becomes a tedious nightmare instead of satisfyingly pulling them apart with your fingers or just smashing it on the floor.
I remember getting a small NiCd electric screwdriver for Mecanno when I was maybe 8. Complete game changer! Still not as easy to disassemble as Lego, but sometimes that was a feature (e.g. when making things that could move it was nice that they didn’t RUD if they fell off the table)
It's true, but, to quote Dr Ben Goldacre, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that."
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.
I tried Meccano twice, and in both cases I had the same problem: independently of how tight I put them, the nuts and bolts would become loose, even before finishing assembling the set. Sad to see this business go, but not surprising.
Meccano is dead. Long live lego. Meccano chose not to adapt, instead becoming an anachronistic thing bought by grandparents as a christmas present. Every kid hates it. I've never bled while playing with lego. Ive never not bled every time i've used meccanno or scalextric.
I don't know, I'm in my mid 30ies and I thought Meccano was old fashioned when I was a kid. Lego Technic is a lot faster to snap together. Meccano seemed less of a toy to me and more of a way to make art that would stay montaged rather than easily broken down and be reused.
In USSR there were a lot of Meccano knock-offs but almost no Lego knock-offs (there were some made in East Germany, but they were scarce). I'd have a ton of different, mostly compatible, sets and play with them for hours.
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.
It’s only been in the last 20 years or so that knockoff Lego got anywhere NEAR the quality of genuine. At the turn of the millennium knockoff Lego was PVC and so badly toleranced that you could barely put a medium or larger set together without it falling apart.
That’s changed now, but it would have been much easier to knockoff low tolerance metal pieces in the 70-90s
Yes, now I know how amazing and advanced Lego is from technological point of view, real marvel of precision molding.
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,
Around 1990 I also knew of just one guy who had Meccano, inherited from his father mostly. Everyone played with Lego. This is the Netherlands.
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.
Maker beam is nice, it’s 10mm x 10mm cross-section which is much smaller than you can normally find. There’s probably a cheap knock off version by now too.
I had my Dad’s set as a young teen (I think it was from the 50s) and like another commenter said they were fiddle especially to take apart. You can build some impressive stuff with it but it gets tedious after a while. Some of the sets a hilarious by today’s standards, I remember one set of instructions was to make an automatic match dispenser/striker.
Can you still get Technic kits to build machinery? All I seem to be able to find now is replica vehicles, albeit some still seem to have pneumatic parts.
Every set seems to have some unique pieces, which seems to go against the thought of building other or new models with combined kits, since those unique pieces are hard to integrate. For some reason, kids today just tend to like build-and-forget rather than create/build. It might as well be similar to assembling Playmobil.
Wow, this is more depressing to me than any of the worries around licensed sets. Most of the available sets don't even have any gearing. 42144 looks nice, but I swear I paid at most 2/3 that for 42121 ca. 2013.
>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.
I did play a lot of meccano when I was young, but today I think the brand did not evolve, meccano itself is great but the company did not reinvent itself sorry
I had a similar toy, but plastic, which came in an orange ammo can, w/ molded brandingo on the side --- Carboloy --- which I wish I could find information on.
I remember getting a Meccano set for my 5th birthday - it gave me access to a screwdriver, which I later used to disassemble some other toys I had.
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.
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